A broken heart can really hurt. It can physically hurt and it can be distracting, obsessive, depressing and unrelenting. The internet offers a lot of advice about what to do when your heart is broken, but this advice is anecdotal, hit and miss at best. That’s why I then searched for articles based on science and I found one the offered an effective way to lessen the pain of a broken heart.
At Scientific American, Psychologist Guy Winch discusses a study that considered three strategies, to see which of these best helped heartbroken subjects reduce their love feelings.
In the first condition, subjects focused on negative reappraisals of their ex-partner (eg, by responding to prompts about their ex’s annoying habits). In the second condition they were asked to reframe their loving feelings as less problematic (eg, by endorsing prompts such as ‘It’s okay to love someone I’m no longer with’). The last condition used distraction (eg, questions about the subjects’ favorite food) to get the participants’ mind off their heartbreak. The researchers found that only negative reappraisals were truly effective in reducing love feelings. However, doing so did increase feelings of unpleasantness.
According to Winch, although this unpleasantness might seem to be a big price to pay to reduce feelings of love, there are two ways to address this unpleasantness: 1) Remember that “when we are heartbroken, our mind is likely to bombard us with highly idealized snapshots, memories and thoughts both about our ex and about our relationship.” When we force ourselves to remember the downsides of the relationship, we are correcting for these untrue idealized images that are causing the pain 2) We shouldn’t contemplate only the person to whom we were attracted. Instead, we should force ourselves to think of the dynamics of the relationship itself. That’s where we can best see the problem, because quite often a relationship consists of two smart good-hearted people who merely lack the chemistry to be a pair.
In my experience, it might take some work to see the downside to a relationship, especially when one is the dumpee rather than the dumper. But it’s not always difficult. There might be low-hanging fruit, things like addictions or rampant dishonesty, things that would have been absolute deal-breakers on Day One. If only your lover had revealed these things at the very beginning of your relationship. Imagine a Match.com profile indicating: “I will tell you the opposite of what I’m really feeling when we discuss important issues.” Or “I will become annoyed when you come over to spend time with me because I’d rather spend time with my other friends, who like to get drink heavily.” For most of us, dysfunctions like these, if revealed up front, would destroy the possibility of ever having a first date. Once a romance has been going on for months, the confirmation bias encourages us to overlook any evidence pointing to major problems like these. Once the relationship fractures apart, major issues like these often become obvious, sad and embarrassing memories. But once the relationship is over, stark bad memories like these are also the best medicine to lessen the pain of your broken heart. The better the hurt, the better the cure.
Even in the absence of major issues, there are doubtless various reasons why any particular relationship failed. There had to be friction and frustration, even if nothing “major,” and even if the cause is ineffable. Even where one doesn’t understand why the relationship was not smooth sailing, one certainly experienced that it was not smooth sailing.
Winch suggests the following as the best salve for a broken heart, whether the issues were major or minor:
If you are trying to get over heartbreak, make a list of the person’s faults as well as of the shortcomings of the actual relationship and keep that list on your phone. Whenever you find yourself having idealized thoughts and memories, whip out your phone and read a few reminders in order to balance your perceptions and remind yourself that your ex was not perfect and neither was the relationship.
I have tried this approach to the letter and I highly recommend it. Reviewing your own long list of real grievances turns a wonderful movie about you and your ex-lover into a sad and frustrating movie that makes you want to throw popcorn at the screen and walk out. Once you see your ex-lover as they were, not merely as you crave them, it’s much easier to turn the page to a new chapter of your life.
What follows is Winch’s TED talk on this same topic:
