How to Get Over an Ex by Correcting Our Misfiring Brains

It would be pleasant to believe that we could think our way rationally out of heartbreak. But our minds are riddled with illogicalities which are in the habit of pulverising the finest arguments of reason and wisdom. In order to outsmart our obsessions, we need to understand how badly our brains often work – and then figure out canny ways to work around their many cognitive glitches. 

1. Chronological Manipulation

It’s commonly – and sensibly – assumed that the best way to get over someone is time. But our brains are easily befuddled as to how much time has actually passed. We can, as it were, speed up (or slow down) time at will. We might notice this on the second day of our holiday in a new country when we reflect that it feels as if we have been in Peru/Japan/Ghana for ‘years.’ Sometimes three days can seem like a decade. What counts is how much novelty we are encountering. The more of it there is, the more we’ll feel separated from the past; the less there is, the more hours we need to lend us an impression of distance. A crucial way of healing from a breakup is therefore to make sure one fills one’s days with intense degrees of novelty. It doesn’t matter exactly what kind of novelty; it might be pleasant or horrible, the key is to arouse a sense of vigilance and surprise. We could – for example – deliberately lose ourselves in a (safe) foreign city; learn an extreme sport; look after an unpredictable animal, volunteer in an Accident and Emergency ward; or enroll in a monastery… A few days dense with inconvenient, terrifying or odd events quickly contribute to an impression of ‘an age’, establishing a bulwark between the present and the split we so badly need to move away from.

2. Future Visualisation

Our brains have great difficulty distinguishing what has actually happened in the world from what has merely happened in the imagination. This vulnerability can be put to work to our advantage when, rather than waiting until we have actually forgotten our partner, we take deliberate steps to imagine the point when we will have done so. We should picture ourselves five years from now: in a journal, we should write down the year and, in great detail, some of the following: how we have forgotten the names of the ex’s three best friends, moved on from our shared routines, turned them into someone to whom we scarcely give a thought… The resulting small essay may only be a work of the imagination for now, but the more we have anticipated the future, the more quickly it can become a reality in our minds.

3. Sentimental Bias Correction

Our brains are hugely sentimental machines, far more inclined to hold on to the positive than the obverse. Normally, this bias is of great use, insulating us from grudges, bitterness, cynicism and melancholy. But when a breakup happens, it is exactly this bias that causes us to suffer unbearably – and unnecessarily. We keep imagining that we have lost an angel, not a human, that the ex is not the flawed person they evidently were (for we would never be in this mess if they were simply as delightful as our brains keep insisting they might be). We have to make a stern effort to zero in on, and enforce, our sense of their complicated sides. And then we need to put this evidence squarely at the center of consciousness – despite our brain’s constant attempts to push it away for the sake of yet another fatefully sweet reverie. We need to open a file on our computer called ‘Unhappiness with X,’ and there lay out in forensic detail at least ten of their most appalling behaviours (to repeat: they exist). We mustn’t rely on memory, it will be uselessly selective, only on the historical record. We need to return to our life-saving document constantly and pedantically:

— We should write it out in longhand – at least every couple of days. And crochet it if we can.

— We should shout the ten points out loud in the woods.

— Every time a pleasant thought appears, we must match it with a correspondingly horrifying one from our list. 

— As we fall asleep, in that creative zone where the conscious mind cedes to the unconscious, we should seed our thoughts with the prompt: ‘This couldn’t work because…’ and then summon up the ten vicious behaviours. The sleeping mind will do the rest.

— We should understand that that our minds still associate the ex’s name – quite unfairly – with a comfort that this person long ago stopped being able to deliver. We are continuing to look for help from a place that will now only yield pain. 

— We should think in detail of what we would have wanted to warn the younger version of ourselves about as we were innocently going off on our first date with the charming-seeming stranger they were years before. Write down the full text. Long hand. Every three days.

— In our grief, the future we imagine we’ve been robbed of draws – entirely unfairly – on the best memories of the past. We need to consciously correct our sense of the future by building it on what we know of their problematic dimensions: a lifetime of their unreliability, decades more of their confusion, years of their self-obsession. The future would have been made up of more of the horrors of the closing stages, not the pleasant moves of the start. A catastrophe has been averted.

— When our minds start to daydream thoughts like ‘Wouldn’t it have been lovely?’ or ‘Is there no way it could still work?’ we must stop our tortuous enquiries from flapping in the wind unchecked. We should stop whatever we are doing and with the furious severity of a drill sergeant, pull out the list of horrors and go through each one until we gradually bludgeon our minds into the self-evident truth: if it was going to have worked, it would have worked already. If they were really as perfect as we fantasise, we simply wouldn’t be here.

4. Social Persuasion

Another quirk of our minds is that we don’t ascribe remotely the same value to what we think as to what others think. One of the best ways to convince ourselves of something is therefore to find others who can tell us what we – as it were – ‘already know’ but are too modest to properly imbibe; we need to hear through the mouths of others truths we are unhelpfully shy about owning on our own. The difficulty is that without our quite noticing, we tend to narrate our stories of heartbreak by giving too much advantage to the ex. That’s why we may hear strangers telling us: ‘You sounded like such a lovely couple, I’m sorry to hear what happened…’ To avoid such destructive responses, we need to tell our story with new honesty. We should talk to people about all the ways in which they were very difficult to be with (and they were) until we get from these new friends the response we actually need to set us free: ‘They sound a handful…’ ‘You’re far better off without them…’ and (best of all) ‘Good riddance…’ When we’re then next alone and the old sentimental refrains start up again, we should remember that we aren’t alone in our suspicions, there is an entire village that now corroborates our distastes.

5. Romantic Asymmetry Attribution

Because we have so little data about what goes on inside other people (besides what they chose to tell us which is not very much), our minds have fateful tendencies to imagine that life will be simpler for others than for ourselves, less marked by anxiety and loneliness, confusion or jealousy. This habit becomes particularly pernicious when it comes to picturing the ex’s life without us. Using everything we know about them, all our experience of their obtuseness and difficulty, we must therefore draw up a very strong image of ‘the complexities of their next relationship.’ Imagine them in detail putting their next partner through some of us what they put us through. Breathe a substantial sigh of relief…

6. Cognitive Interruption

Part of the problems of our brains is that they don’t signal to us when they are no longer thinking properly. They don’t let us know that at 9am they are likely to be sharp and balanced, while at 9pm, all perspective is likely to be lost and melodrama will be the rule. Part of operating our minds successfully involves knowing when we should distrust certain thoughts we have about the ex. Sanity means recognising how much of the time our minds won’t be working properly. We should be especially careful about sudden convictions that they are – after all – our soulmate. When such certainties descend, we should check at once on our levels of exhaustion and probably go to bed immediately.

7. The Dignity Deficit

In the wake of a break up, we’re prone to give the ex all the advantages while failing to notice how much we have ceased – more or less – to be on our own side. To reconnect us to our reserves of self-love and speed up recovery, we need to become aware of the humiliations and ill-treatment we have slowly and imperceptibly become party to – and we should do so through a process of conscious exaggeration. As when a vaccine is administered to kickstart an immune system, we need to abase ourselves fully in order to generate a fightback. We need to write (but not send) a begging letter, outlining why the ex was so right and lovely and why we are so awful and flawed. Somewhere in the process, we will hit a moment when a small voice in us will, perhaps for the first time, scream: ‘Enough’ – and our recovery will gain momentum.

8. Neural Loop Deamplification

The more we give our brains a chance to think about something, the more they will keep doing so. When the ex come into our minds, we must therefore learn to change the internal subject at once, like a diplomat attempting to sidestep an explosive topic. We should give ourselves an hour each day for rumination, and then reduce the allocation by ten minutes every week. We should notice what times and what situations we’re most likely to think of them in, and in response start to learn a foreign language or memorise a long passage of Homer instead.

9. Rage Release

Probably we are – somewhere in the background – extremely angry with them. But in the interests of keeping the peace, our conscious minds tend to exile our fury, which nevertheless quietly haunts us through insomnia, weepiness, irritability and depression. To release ourselves from our symptoms, we should allow our real feelings into our minds – first allowing ourselves to imagine that we even are angry, and then giving ourselves full permission to express the emotion, perhaps while swearing and crying a lot to music in the early hours.

10. The Unpredictability Bias

Our minds dig themselves into holes by constantly believing that they can know how the future will be for us via an extrapolation from our present. The happy person thinks they will always be happy, the miserable person thinks they will always be miserable. In the wake of a break-up, we must insist on a far more bearable proposition: we just don’t know how things will be for us going forward. We may find an ideal new person – or we may not. We couldn’t have predicted that this person would ever come into our lives; we can’t predict very much about their replacement either. We can’t be sure. But what we can be absolutely certain of, and must tell ourselves again and again, is that we don’t know. Extreme despair is therefore as unwarranted as boundless hope. The only sane perspective is a quiet modest sceptical awe at the mystery of everything. 

All these techniques can appear insultingly artificial, as if we were training a half-witted dog. But when we are in deep trouble, we shouldn’t compound our misery by exaggerating our rational control. We will start to be appropriately kind to ourselves when we treat our brains as the flawed instruments they are, and give them all the help they need to recover contact with reality.