How to Forget Your Ex: 15 Tough Steps to Reclaim Your Life

A breakup hits you hard. Without warning or discounts for your age or status. You sit in a deafeningly empty apartment, stare at one point, and it feels like oxygen has simply been pumped out of the room. And that's normal. You're hurting not because you're weak, but because you're alive. But let's be honest: dwelling on the past is a lousy strategy. It's time to pull yourself up by the bootstraps.

Surgical intervention: cutting to the quick

You can't heal if you keep pouring salt on the wound every day. The first thing you have to do is conduct a thorough cleaning of the space. Both physical and digital.

Stay away from her. Sounds trite, but it's the foundation. Don't look for chance encounters. Don't drive past her house, peering into the windows. Don't monitor who she's having coffee with during her lunch break. Any contact sets you back a week in your recovery.

Unfriend her. Everywhere. Right now. No "we're adults, we can stay friends." No. You're unfriending her so that at three in the morning, after having one too many, you don't break down and watch her new stories. Burn this digital connection before it burns you.

Get rid of the artifacts. Look around. Her forgotten comb on the sink. The t-shirt she slept in. The mug she was the only one who drank from. You won't forget the person if every morning your gaze stumbles upon their things. Gather it all in a bag. Throw it away. Give it away. Hide it in the attic at your parents' house. Just get it out of sight.

Avoid old routes and triggers. That very bar where you celebrated your anniversary? Forget the way there. Movies you watched cuddling under a blanket? Into the trash. Calculate exactly what triggers a bout of nostalgia in you—the smell of a particular perfume, a musical track, a certain street—and ruthlessly cut off that contact. Temporarily. You'll get over it later, but right now it's a zone of alienation.

The vacuum must be filled

Nature abhors a vacuum. Where she used to be, there is now a huge black hole. Your brain is frantically looking for its usual dose of dopamine. Give it other food.

Keep busy to the limit. Work, repairing an old motorcycle, courses on neural networks, the gym until your muscles tremble. Fill your schedule so that you don't have a single free minute for reflection. Fatigue is your best friend right now. You should fall into bed and pass out, not stare at the ceiling.

Do what drives you. Remember what got you going before you met. Used to play video games all night long? Start it up. Loved basketball? Get a ticket to a game. Just, I beg you, don't drown your sorrow in alcohol. Alcohol is a depressant. It will give you the illusion of lightness for a couple of hours, and in the morning you'll be covered with such a concrete slab of despair that it won't seem enough.

Dive into books. Seriously, it works better than any movie. You watch a movie passively, but reading forces the brain to work, draw images, analyze the text. Take a strong, mind-numbing thriller or dark science fiction. Make your mind worry about the survival of Stephen King's characters, not about your personal drama. Let it be interested in what's on the next page, not in your ex's profile.

People around: anchors of reality

Loneliness is a lousy advisor. When you're alone, the inner voice starts whispering all sorts of nonsense, idealizing the past. You need the noise of other people's lives.

The one conversation rule. Take your best friend. Buy beer. And once—listen, exactly once!—pour your heart out. Whine, complain, curse, punch the wall. Get your share of male sympathy. And the next morning the topic is closed forever. Don't turn into a professional whiner who's a pain to sit at the same table with.

Train your environment. Friends may start bashing her with the best of intentions, trying to support you. Or accidentally drop: "Remember how you guys...". Stop it harshly. Say directly: "Guys, we don't talk about her anymore. At all." Any mention of her name is a hook that pulls you back to the bottom.

Just don't be alone. Go out into the world. Sit in noisy coffee shops, chat with acquaintances, fit into any activity. Or better yet, pay attention to new girls. No one is rushing you to the registry office or into new serious relationships. But a light flirtation, a stranger's smile at the bar, a non-committal conversation… It will work like a defibrillator for your trampled ego. You'll suddenly remember that the world is full of wonderful people.

The most annoying healer

Patience. Yes, I know. This is the most disgusting advice of all. You want to tear this pain out of your chest right now, not wait for the mythical "someday." But the truth is, it will take time.

It won't happen with the snap of your fingers. It won't pass in a week or two. There will be rollbacks. There will be days when it seems to you that you have let everything go, and then the random smell of coffee on the autumn wind will twist you in half again. But if you don't sit idly by, if you force yourself to live, move and communicate—one morning you will wake up, pour water into a glass, look out the window and suddenly realize...

You haven't thought about her for a whole week. And you're—okay.