How to Get Over a Breakup: What Actually Helps
Entry No. 144 ·
By The IF Team
You get over a breakup by rebuilding a life that feels like yours again, not by forcing the feelings to stop. What helps most is surprisingly ordinary: keep the basics going, lean on the people who love you, put some distance between you and the reminders, and slowly work out who you are on your own. The love does not vanish on a schedule, and it does not need to. It fades fastest when the rest of your life gets louder.
If you are in the thick of it, you are not overreacting. A breakup rearranges your days, your plans and, in a real sense, your idea of yourself. But what usually happens next is more hopeful than heartbreak feels. In one study of people who had recently been through a breakup, most reported personal growth afterwards, and high positive emotions were nearly twice as common as high negative ones. Growth was likeliest when the relationship had stopped helping them grow, and it did not depend on who had ended things.
Being honest about what you feel is part of moving on, and it is the idea IF is built around. IF lets people say how they feel, truthfully, whether they are single or with someone and whoever the feeling is for, so that something that started in their actual life can be put into words there and acted on once the timing allows. For now, though, the person to be honest with is you.
Why a breakup knocks you sideways
Couples do not only share a sofa and a calendar. Over months and years they share friends, routines, in-jokes and plans, and they start to think of themselves as half of a pair. Researchers at Northwestern University found that after a breakup, people’s sense of who they were changed and grew less clear, and that loss of clarity on its own predicted how distressed they felt.
That explains a lot of what heartbreak feels like from the inside: reaching for your phone to tell them something, the Sunday that suddenly has no shape, the “we” that keeps slipping into your sentences. You have not only lost a person. You have lost a role, a routine and part of a story about yourself, and those take a while to rebuild.
The first few weeks: protect the basics
- Keep your body going. Sleep, food, daylight and a walk will not mend a broken heart, but everything is harder without them.
- Let people in. Tell two or three friends what happened and let them feed you, distract you and sit with you. You do not have to be good company.
- Turn down the reminders. Moving the photos to a folder you never open and giving their hoodie a drawer of its own both help. Whether to unfollow your ex walks through mute, unfollow and block, and the no contact rule explains why a break from contact is for your healing, not a tactic.
- Decide in advance how you will handle their messages. If your ex gets in touch, you do not have to answer straight away; what to do when your ex texts you helps you read it and choose a reply, or none.
- Keep the big decisions small. A new haircut is fine. Quitting your job, moving city or a long message at 2am can wait a week.
Rebuild who you are, one ordinary thing at a time
If losing your sense of self is part of what hurts, rebuilding it is part of what heals. In a study of 210 recently separated young adults, those who reflected on their breakup in depth at four visits over nine weeks showed bigger improvements in their sense of who they were apart from their ex than people who only answered questions at the start and the end. Thinking it through, rather than avoiding it entirely, seemed to help people pull their own story apart from the relationship’s.
You do not need a research lab to do the same. A few places to start:
- Go back to something you let slide. The band, the five-a-side team, the evening class, the friend you saw less of while you were together.
- Try one thing that was never theirs. A new café, a new route home, a weekend somewhere the two of you never went.
- Write about it in the first person singular. Not “we used to”, but “I want”, “I liked”, “I am”. Notice what changes when you stop narrating as a pair.
- Keep the parts of you the relationship brought out. The adventurousness, the patience, the cooking: those were yours all along, and they leave with you.
What to do with the love that is still there
You cannot switch love off, but you can turn the volume down. In a small laboratory study, the psychologist Sandra Langeslag compared ways of handling feelings for an ex. Thinking honestly about the ex’s less lovable sides reduced how in love people felt, though it dampened their mood for a while, while distraction lifted their mood without touching the love itself.
Neither works like a switch, and the study only measured short-term effects. Together, though, they suggest a sensible balance. When you catch yourself replaying the best bits, let the rest of the picture in too: the arguments that went in circles, the plans that never quite matched. On the days that feel heavy, reach for good distraction without guilt. And let yourself still love them for a while. A feeling does not have to be wrong to be finished.
Closure, friendship and what happens with your ex
Many people want one more conversation, a last explanation that makes the ending make sense. Sometimes you get it. Often you do not, and closure can be built without them. Whether you can be friends is a separate question, and usually a later one: being friends with an ex tends to work best once neither of you is hoping for more. If you share a friend group, a little planning spares everyone a lot of awkwardness, and breaking up within a friend group has the details.
If part of you wonders about trying again, whether to get back together is worth reading slowly, before you send anything. If they have already moved on, loving an ex who is with someone new speaks to that particular ache.
If you have not ended it yet
Not everyone reading this is on the far side of the ending. If you know a relationship is over and you are working out how to say so, how to break up with someone kindly covers the conversation itself: where, when and what to say. Ending things clearly and with care tends to make the getting-over easier for both of you.
How long it takes, honestly
There is no fixed number of weeks, and anyone who gives you one is guessing. It depends on how long you were together, how it ended, how much of your life you shared and what else is going on for you. What most people notice is that recovery does not move in a straight line: a good fortnight, then a bad Tuesday. The bad days drift further apart, and one evening you realise you have not thought about them since lunch.
If the person you are getting over was never fully yours to lose, because they were taken, far away or never quite together with you, getting over someone you can’t be with fits your situation better. And when you start wondering about dating again, how soon to date after a breakup has a sensible answer.
Where IF fits: when you are ready to feel something new
IF is not a breakup cure, and it will not hurry your heart. What it offers is the other half of moving on: a way to be honest about new feelings when they come, whoever they are for and whatever anyone’s status happens to be.
When you are single and ready, set your status to single and IF works like any other dating app. If the person you like is single too and already on IF, send a Like, and a chat opens once they accept it.
Feelings do not always arrive on cue, though. You might find yourself drawn to someone who is already with someone, months before you expected to feel anything again. An IF lets you say so without asking anything of them: a few honest lines, no more than 250 characters, sealed, with no chat able to start while either of you is in a relationship. You might come across them in Swipe. If not, any contact detail they chose to share with you — an Instagram handle, an email address, a mobile number — will find them in Search. If they use IF, they may hear that an IF is waiting, though not who sent it or what it says until it opens. If they have not joined, an email address brings them one short invitation, and a number or handle brings nothing at all.
As for the ex, you can be honest there too, whatever ended things: a move, a visa, a year that asked too much of you both, or a decision you now see differently. The exceptions are simple. If they have asked you never to contact them again, or the two of you settled on no contact, leave it. Otherwise, when they are on IF and you are both single, a Like says it; if they have met someone since, an IF lets you say what you still feel, once, without disturbing anyone’s present, because nothing can turn into a conversation while either of you has a partner. Neither is a way around a no. You get to be honest; they get to decide.
Sending your first IF is free. The hard part, as ever, is the honesty, and getting over a breakup is good practice for that.
Questions people ask
Why do breakups hurt so much?
Because you lose more than a person. You lose routines, plans, part of your social life and some of how you see yourself, and research links that loss of self-clarity to how distressed people feel. The pain reflects how woven together your lives were, not how weak you are.
Is it normal to feel relieved after a breakup?
Very. Relief often sits alongside sadness, especially when a relationship had stopped helping you grow. Feeling lighter does not mean you never loved them; it may mean you are getting parts of yourself back.
What are the stages of getting over a breakup?
There is no official sequence, but many people describe a similar arc: a raw, restless first stretch, a long middle of good and bad days, and a gradual return to feeling like yourself, often with new interests and people in your life. It rarely runs in a straight line, and slipping back for a day is part of it, not a failure.
How do you stop thinking about your ex?
Not by trying to ban the thoughts, which tends to make them louder. Cut down the reminders, fill your days with people and plans, and when they come to mind, let yourself remember the whole picture rather than the highlights. The thoughts fade as the rest of your life takes up the space.
Take your life back one ordinary day at a time. And when a new feeling arrives, for someone single or someone whose timing is not yet yours, you can say it honestly in an IF.