Dating : An Active Approach to Getting Over a Heartbreak (aka Love Addiction)

Addiction is nothing new to our society. We’ve been fighting addictions for centuries and every year there is a new addiction to fight. From cigarette addictions to Juul addictions to drug addictions, we know these are bad. We take drug addictions pretty seriously and recognize it’s potential for self-harm. But not all addictions are bad. In fact, some are natural and have helped us survive for millions of years. Food and water are perfect examples of these natural addictions. You see, addictions are just well developed reward and motivation systems that are meant to make us crave something when we don’t have it and reward us when we do. Man-made substances just happen to hijack these reward systems to make us crave something artificial (sugar, anyone?).

So drugs = bad, food and water = good. I’m glad we’re on the same page…

But there’s one addiction that’s a little bit more nuanced than just “good” or “bad.” When we have it, it can lead to some of the most rewarding human experiences possible but when we don’t, it often leads to some of the most severe forms of depression (read: withdrawal symptoms). By the name of the article you probably know what I’m talking about: romantic love.

Yes, love is an addiction; it follows the same pathways in the brain as every other addiction, just like food, water, and drugs. But it’s a perfectly natural addiction and like food and water, it has helped us survive for millions of years, both as a species and as individuals.

Love is not an emotion — it’s a motivation system, it’s a drive, it’s part of the reward system of the brain.

Back in the day of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, as we went from walking on all fours to standing on two feet, infants went from being carried on our backs to being held in our arms and for our female ancestors, this presented a problem. They now needed to both carry a 20 pound sand bag everywhere and still be able to protect themselves from predators. For our male ancestors, it meant we had to protect and aid our female counterparts to ensure the survival of our genetic offspring. And so, pair bonding became a necessity and an eventual drive in our brains to ensure the survival and reproduction of our species.

Flash forward millions of years and we have romantic love (sorry, I didn’t mean to burst your twin flame and karmic soulmate bubble). But this is not meant to undermine the beauty and uniqueness of love. If I didn’t care for it, I wouldn’t have spent the last eight years studying social dynamics and the psychology of dating. This is meant to show one thing: love is an addiction. A nuanced addiction— amazing when you have it and extremely painful when you don’t — but an addiction nonetheless. And as such, when we begin to experience the unhealthy withdrawal symptoms that come with addiction, we need treat it with the same severity. In fact, research has shown that the pain of a heartbreak lights up the same areas of the brain as physical pain. And so the most common form of depression we all experience in our lives is created: heartbreak. But I’m calling bullshit on that romanticized term and for our purposes, we’re going to call it what it really is: love addiction withdrawals.

When it comes to drug addictions, we have such elaborate steps and systems in place to help people get over it. We have twelve-step programs, psychotherapeutic approaches, relapse prevention, cognitive therapy, etc. But when it comes to love addiction, the best most of us get is: “it wasn’t meant to be,” or “everything happens for a reason.” Great advice, bro.

The problem is most of us take a passive approach to getting over a love addiction. We feed it by allowing our minds to wander to the “what if’s” and constantly replay our fondest memories. We wait until the very last minute, where the pain of heartbreak starts to finally outweigh the pleasure of emotional masturbation, to finally flip the switch and get over this person. For some, this takes a couple of months, for others years. And that’s my point. Without an active approach, like the one you would take with any other severe addiction, you are left at the mercy of your brain chemicals.

So the first part of getting over a love addiction is understanding how it works. We’ve already established that romantic love is one of nature’s original addictions, evolved over millions of years as a basic human drive with one goal: win him/her over. How else are we supposed to get the best genetic code for our offspring and ensure its survival? We truly are fighting millions of years of evolution here. So as demystifying as we make love seem, it becomes clear that all these emotions we feel are nothing more than a motivation system made up of brain chemicals making sure we stay on target.

Dopamine, the reward chemical, makes sure of this by making us feel pleasure and excitement every time we’re with this person. Testosterone increases our heart rate and overwhelms us with sexual desire whenever we’re near this person. Oxytocin, the same chemical that gets released during childbirth and breastfeeding, makes us feel all warm and cuddly every time we are touched by this person and spikes after sex. And the obsessive thinking that makes us relive all our memories with this person and even create fake ones in our head can be blamed on low serotonin. Wow… I guess we’re not so crazy after all. #blameitonthebrainchemicals

It’s easy to see now how badly we are at the mercy of our primitive brain. But I know what you’re thinking… how the f*ck then are we supposed to fight millions of years of evolution and manage to sober up?

Look, this addiction is all mental and that’s what makes this so difficult. Unlike drugs or alcohol where you have something physical you must abstain from, with love addiction your thoughts are what feed your addiction. And by definition, you CANNOT think your way out of your own thoughts. The only way to get over this is through action. Let me elaborate because without understanding this concept, nothing else I am going to say will work….

If this addiction all plays out inside your head, there simply is no way to think your way out of it. The more you try to think your way out of it and try to plan what you can do or what steps you should take first, the deeper in your own thoughts you will get and thereby the more you will feed your addiction. Therefore, the only solution is to take action. And that’s what this guide is for. I will layout the action steps you have to take so you don’t have to think about them, you just have to trust and follow the process — put one step in front of the other. Otherwise, you will continue to feed your addiction.

So it’s understood: we’re not going to think our way out of this. Instead, we will be taking specific action designed to do one thing: hijack the same reward system that got us here. We use those same brain chemicals and get them to work with us instead of against us. Fight fire with fire, right?

We have to establish something first. The point is NOT to repress your emotions. Remember the age-old saying: what you resist persists and what you allow yourself to experience fully will eventually dissipate. You are allowed to feel, you are allowed to be sad, you are allowed to cry, but you are not allowed to stay there. Let it all out and then keep moving forward.

The goal isn’t to repress, it’s to redirect.

But First: A Warning

Before I dive into it, understand this is a complete step by step guide to getting over someone. What this means is you have to have decided that it’s time to get over this person. And that’s where things get a little bit complicated. I get it, one of the biggest decisions we have to make in our dating lives is when to get over someone and when to try to get them back. But here’s the beauty of this: whether you want to get them back or want to get over them, it’s the same process. It’s one of the paradoxes of life: you can’t win someone over you can’t live without — it’s just not healthy. And if the relationship never begun or you’re stuck in dreaded limbo — that’s definitely not healthy.

Look, I’m all for equipping yourself with the best tactics and techniques to win someone over. In fact, that’s where 90% of my expertise lies. But once you get past the initial phases of dating and you start to want things to get a little more serious, it’s either going to happen or it’s not — but we don’t chase those who do not want to be with us here. That’s for those with low self-worth… and that’s not us, right? 😉

So here’s my advice: if the relationship is over, it’s time to get over it. If the relationship never begun, it’s time to get over it… Onward.

1. Kill hope
2. No contact
3. Take care of yourself
4. Rewire your brain
5. Prove yourself wrong

Let’s start with Step 1: Kill Hope

Hope is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it has inspired many movements in history and created some of the most powerful leaders. It is what gets people through the hardest time in their lives. But it’s also what makes people waste most of their lives. When it comes to hope, what often gets left out is the sense of false hope — what keeps us with one foot on crumbling terrain. The stories we never hear about those who held on to whatever sense of false hope they had only to accomplish nothing and waste years of their life doing so… bummer, right?

I know, killing hope sounds crass and a bit extreme. But that’s the point. This isn’t about losing hope or letting go of hope, it’s about killing hope — this is an active approach, remember?

This step goes hand in hand with the decision to get over this person and this is the hardest step for most. We’ve invested so much energy into convincing ourselves that this could be something and sometimes even spent years with this person and now we have to convince ourselves that there is no more future with this person. Unfortunately in this case, the only way to move forward with your life is to leave them behind.

Decisions happen in a second. As soon as you decide you are going to get over this person, everything becomes easier. But for that, you have to kill hope. Kill the notion that anything will ever happen with this person, kill any future events you mentally planned to do with them, kill any “but’s” and “what if’s.”

Disclaimer: This WILL be painful. And if it’s not, you are repressing NOT experiencing.

What you are basically doing here is destroying all neural pathways you have created with this person. Every time you thought about future events with this person or made plans or thought about what could happen, you created a neural pathway. By killing hope, you are telling your brain that you have no more use for these neural pathways and this is what causes the pain (this is why breakups hurt so bad).

This step can take weeks or it can take seconds. It’s your decision.

But what about closure, Luis?! I need my closure!
Closure is overrated. You want closure because it hurts and you think getting closure will help ease the pain. But think about what closure is. It is the other person’s explanation as to why they’re not interested in you anymore. I want you to really internalize the following: disinterest is closure. Them no longer being interested in you should be more than enough reason for you to move on and I know that hurts to hear and it hurts even more once you accept it. But just because it hurts does not mean it’s the wrong thing. The pain is part of the process.

Understand, I’m all for learning from your mistakes but seeking closure is not how to do it. If the breakup was because of a mistake you made, you know it. You shouldn’t need them to tell you that. If you know you made a mistake, learn from it and move on. But it may not be the time to do that yet. We’ll revisit that in Step 3. For now, remember:

So by now you should have made the decision already to kill hope. And now as with any death, you must now allow yourself a mourning period which leads us to…

Step 2: No Contact

You can’t make best friends with a bottle of liquor — well, at least not if you’re an alcoholic. Just like with any addiction, relapse is a very real threat. But unlike with drugs and alcohol, this addiction can be fed with a simple touch of our smartphones. Remember that reward system we talked about earlier that has evolved for millions of years? Unfortunately, it will continue to reward us and keep us focused on our former partner every time we see them, whether in person or on our phones. In fact, we crave them even more now that they are no longer with us — the same region of our brain involved with cocaine cravings light up when are no longer with our former partner.

This whole nonsense of “staying friends” with your ex-lover is ridiculous — at least in the short-run. You need a period of sobriety. Sure, once you’re sober and your brain chemicals aren’t working against you anymore, some may want to befriend their former lovers again and if they can handle it, that’s fine. But if you feel a sense of relapse coming, realize it’s too soon and get away before it’s too late.

Remember, this addiction is fed through thoughts. It’s what makes it so difficult to get over. So anything that makes you think about them is working against you. This means social media, pictures on your phone, old texts, etc. Trying to get over someone with constant reminders of them around you is like trying to go on a diet with a pantry full of sweets.

Realistically, I don’t expect you to delete your social media. But you do need to get rid of the constant reminders of this person.

• Hide their posts, hide their stories, do whatever it takes. This is for you. If you need to, go ahead and block them or unfollow them. These are all easy things to do, just Google how to do it if you don’t know how.
• Get your pictures with them out of sight. You can upload to your computer or put them in a private folder on your phone but then delete them from your main photos that you see daily.
• For God’s sake, remove pictures with them from your profile–or at least archive them. Whether you look at them or not, we both know this gives you a secret sense of hope.

Make no mistake: your thoughts can and will easily overpower your willpower. One reminder of your ex and you will find yourself asking yourself “why” (loss aversion bias) or replaying false memories better than they actually were (Mandela effect). Your mind is powerful and trying to directly fight against it will be futile. All these triggers around you are like the spark to the fire that is your obsession. Get rid of them.

As I said in step 1, this phase will be painful at first. Your brain will be destroying all the neural pathways that were created during your time with that person and that literally engages the same parts of the brain that deal with physical pain. This is OKAY and it is human. Allow yourself to mourn and grief, as you would with the loss of any loved one — but don’t sulk.

Trying to get over someone with constant reminders of them around you is like trying to go on a diet with a pantry full of sweets.

Everyone will be in this phase different amounts of time but there is such a thing as getting stuck in this phase too long and that’s typically when you don’t move on to the next step.

Step 3: Take Care of Yourself

During your sobriety, it’s easy to let yourself fall apart. Don’t get me wrong, you definitely should give yourself time to feel and experience the emotions that come up and don’t suppress them. But these emotions can be addicting too so don’t indulge in them too long. The easiest way to do this is to set an end time. Give yourself time — a specific amount of time — to feel and cry and binge eat and get high and watch Netflix and do whatever you need to do, as long as it does not harm you or others, and then stop. I typically recommend 3 days but it may be different for everyone. However, definitely don’t let it go over a week. Once that period is over, it’s time to get your shit together.

Disclaimer: sometimes we f*ck up and it’s okay. If you end up relapsing during this time, don’t beat yourself up over it. I get it’s not easy and you may go back to feeling sad from time to time and it’s okay. What’s not okay is to let yourself dwell on it for longer than you should and go back into the “why did it happen” thoughts. Recognize it, learn from it, and get back on your path.

Remember earlier we said we were going to start making those brain chemicals work with us instead of against us? This is where it starts. And the simplest place to start is with your body.

With all this talk about mental health, we often forget that our mind doesn’t work exclusively. In fact our body systems heavily regulate our hormones and when we treat it like shit, we feel like shit. If we treat our bodies right by moving (exercise), taking care of our gut, and allowing our bodies to repair themselves properly, the mind will starts to follow. Remember: the mind follows the body just as much as the body follows the mind and during this time, it’s a bit easier to focus on your body.

I don’t want to turn this into a health article — there are tons of resources out there that go into detail about living for optimal brain health. But here are some places to start:

• eat a protein-dense diet
• eat fatty fish or supplement with fish or krill oil
• get plenty of unsaturated fats (avocado, oils, etc)
• get your micro-nutrients by eating the rainbow or supplement with a green powder
• drink water

Your gut health is essential to healing yourself and improving your mood; 95% of serotonin in your body is produced in your gut.

More:

• get plenty of natural sunlight
• get a massage
• practice daily mindfulness
• did I say drink water already? Well, do it.
• MOVE. Everyday. Whether it’s morning sun salutations, squats and deadlifts, or ROMWOD doesn’t matter. Just get up and do what your body was meant to do.

Do all of this and you’ll notice your mind start to feel better; your dopamine and serotonin levels will increase. But we’re not done because we don’t live in a vacuum. The next step is to lean into your loved ones, your friends and family. But you probably have already been doing this and if you haven’t, this is your next mission. But be careful — some of us tend to emotionally vomit on our loved ones when we are going through a hard time and like we said earlier, that’s just as bad as feeding your addiction. Instead, make a rule that you will not speak about said person while you hang out and enjoy your time with them. This simple step will release oxytocin, the famous love brain chemical. But it’s not exclusive to child birth and sex with a lover. It also gets released through simple bonding with your friends and family. Simple eye contact, physical touch, reconnecting with old friends (yes, FaceTime counts), cuddling and showing your appreciation to someone all release oxytocin. In fact, Paul Zak, Ph.D., a pioneer in oxytocin research recommends eight hugs a day.

I know, this is all so simple yet so many people just don’t do this when they’re going through love addiction withdrawals. Instead, they sulk and continue to emotionally masturbate. Or worse, they do ALL of this but they skip Step 1 and have yet to make the decision to move on. So they get stuck thinking they’re making progress because they momentarily feel better, only to relapse day in and day out.

What’s simple to do is also simple not to do. — Jim Rohn

Lastly, as I said in Step 1, this is also the time where you can finally look back and take the lessons learned from your past relationship — with a clear and level head not an emotional one. If you made a mistake, recognize it and internalize it but don’t dwell on it and beat yourself up. You have a greater chance of doing this the right way now that you’re not as emotional and a lot more clear headed.

Step 4: Rewire your Brain

In his book, Psychocybernetics, Maxwell Maltz talks about humans as being teleological, or goal seeking, by nature. This means that we are designed to strive towards a goal until we achieve it. The problem is, up until this point, our target has been our former partner. That changes now with one simple solution: set new goals.

It’s crazy how effective our brain is when it comes to achieving specific goals. But for this to work, you cannot just set any goals. We’re fighting against a basic human drive, remember? For this to be effective, these have to be short-term goals, ideally that are connected to your main life vision. For one simple reason: every time you reach a goal, your brain rewards you — literally — by releasing huge amounts of dopamine. And by making sure we set goals we can achieve in a short period of time (I’d say about a week), we ensure that our brain focuses in on a new target and every time we achieve our goal we set a new one. Between the no-contact period that you’ve given yourself and the constant release of dopamine week after week, these are the big guns.

So it’s time for a new project, or multiple new projects. I typically choose one or a couple of fields from our 4 main areas of life: health, wealth, relationships, and spirituality. These are very broad areas you can choose from, whether it be setting a physique goal (health), starting a new venture or furthering your career (wealth), improving your social skills (relationships), or even focusing on yourself (spirituality). Regardless of what you choose, the important part is to incrementally work towards the goal you set every day.

Step 5: Prove Yourself Wrong

Assuming you’ve been doing the steps above for some time, at this point you should be feeling back in control of your life. You wake up with new purpose, strive for your new goals and feel great consistently achieving them. So first, congratulations on having the will power to get here. But something is still missing. You’ve given your brain the time apart to weaken those pathways, you’ve made sure you won’t relapse by keeping your distance (both physically and mentally), you’ve optimized your mood by taking care of yourself, and you’ve redirected your brain’s natural targeting system. Yet something still feels weird about it. Essentially, you now have to prove yourself wrong.

You see, once upon a time your mind filled with thoughts thinking this person was the best and only option for you. You thought they could do no wrong as all their idiosyncrasies that you once could not stand became overshadowed by their ideal qualities. You thought about how hard it was to find someone you were so compatible with, who aroused you so much and probably found yourself saying “wow, it will be so hard to find someone like them again” at some point or another. And now you understand why. Similar to how tunnel focused we become when we are at the extremes of thirst and hunger (remember romantic love comes from the same region of the brain as those), we were at the extreme of love withdrawal. But with help of steps 1-4, you are now thinking a bit more rationally. Now it’s time to prove yourself wrong.

“There are plenty of fish in the sea” is probably the most irritating advice I’ve ever heard but that’s because the only times you ever hear it are the times you probably want to hear it the least. Yet if you can find a way to truly believe it at your core, you can find a way into what we call an abundant mentality. And the only way to do this is to get back out there and meet new people. You don’t necessarily have to go on dates, that depends on your preferred style of courtship. But at the very least, go out and meet or get introduced to guys/girls that you can flirt with and have fun with. You don’t have to date them or sleep with them — that part is up to you. But at the very least just have fun with them, whatever that means to you. Doing so will prove to yourself that you can have a great time with other people in a non-platonic way. There are others you get a surge of sexual desire for. You do have the capability of being heavily attracted to someone else.

If you’re currently in the middle of a heartbreak, I get this is not what you want to hear and it may sound almost impossible. That’s why this is the final step and it may take some time to get to here. If you’re not ready to wrap your head around this, it’s okay. But start with steps 1–4 and when you’re ready, come back to this one. Everyone heals at different rates but in my experience, it’s better to get here sooner rather than later.

Furthermore, none of this is meant to diminish what you had with your ex. What you had was real and was beautiful during its time. But it’s meant to help you see it for what it was and see your current situation for what it is.

One important caveat here though. Do not fall into the trap of comparison. Sometimes we will catch ourselves comparing the people we’re with to our ex partner. This is normal but understand what you had with that person was in its chapter 20. Every new interaction you have with people starts in chapter 1. And that’s the fun part. Allow yourself to experience the fun, adventure, and spontaneity that comes with having an awesome dating life.

At the end of it all, the important part of this step is to come to the realization that you got this.

Closing Thoughts

Heartbreak sucks, love is a double edged sword. That won’t change any time soon and it’s part of life. More importantly, it’s what makes us human. The challenge here is to avoid becoming jaded by it all. In the moment, it will always suck but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. Much like love, life is more nuanced than just “good” or “bad.” Instead, I want to leave you with one paradigm.

What happens to us in life comes in two forms: that which will leave us more open and that which will leave us more closed to future experiences — and that is up to us and our interpretation of these moments. However, when it comes to love and dating, it’s important to always take a lesson from what happens to us but also make sure that we leave the situation more open. No one likes a jaded player (unless we’re talking about Hank Moody in Californication).

So be fearless, love with an open heart, take risks, and always say yes to adventure.

-LA