Suffering for love: 6 tips for overcoming it
Once you assume that a relationship has no future, you have to do what you can to feel better.
Suffering for love is one of those kinds of experiences that are hard to imagine when you start a relationship.
Falling in love can make practically everything that happens to us on a daily basis be perceived in a different way, since its emotional impact influences our way of perceiving what happens to us. But this is true for better and for worse. The lack of love or frustration caused by relational problems in love also causes suffering that reaches almost all areas of our lives.
Thus, suffering for love is one of the most damaging types of psychological suffering, given that, just as suffering for love is one of the most damaging types of psychological sufferingJust as falling in love permeates almost all of our mental processes, so do the problems arising from it. What to do to make this discomfort disappear or almost completely disappear?
Tips to overcome the suffering for love
The advice that you will read below can be a very useful help in the moments in which the hopelessness and the sadness that produces and sadness produced by heartbreak seem to fill everything. However, it must be clear that each case is different, and when applying these steps it is necessary to adapt them to the context in which you live.
1. Assume that you will need time to get better
As it happens in everything related to the emotional problems, in order to stop suffering for love, it is not necessary to take time.to stop suffering for love there are no easy and instantaneous solutions. This is so because our nervous system, which is the basis of emotions, is not used to experience sudden changes that leave sustained changes in the long term, unless it is due to injuries.
Mental processes, including those responsible for emotion, occur thanks to the interaction of millions of interconnected neurons, and in order to overcome suffering for love it is essential that the necessary time elapses for some of these nerve cells to "learn" to interact with each other in a different way.
Obviously, knowing that you are going to need some time to recover will not make you recover. However, it will help to prevent the problem from getting worse and becoming entrenched, since those who expect improvements overnight may become so frustrated that they become obsessed with the issue. The fact of feeling emotionally "blocked" by the simple fact of not recovering instantaneously makes us think all the time about how to get rid of this emotional entanglement, and this in turn makes our attention more and more focused on the problem. makes that our attention remains more and more focused on that discomfort.A vicious circle.
2. Evaluate your case to make sure you are not depressed.
It is one thing to suffer for love and another to experience depression. The latter is a mental illness that can become very serious and that, although it can be triggered by events that happen to us, its causes are to some extent independent of the love problems we may have.
It should be noted, however, that in the vast majority of cases in which we suffer from love depression is not behind it, so at first there is no reason for alarm bells to ring. But if you think that you suffer in an extreme way and in a constant and sustained manner, you should not assume that you have depression either; in that case the next step is to see a mental health professional for a psychological diagnosis. for a psychological diagnosis.
3. Rest first
Between the first hours and the first few days after having started to suffer for love, if it is an "acute" case caused by a specific event (a breakup, a heartbreak, etc.) it is very possible that you do not have the strength to propose big changes, not even those that have to do with feeling better. For that reason, it is good that you set yourself a margin of time to recover a little, physically and mentally.physically and mentally.
To do so, it is good that you set a time beforehand when the initial recovery stage is over and you start to actively act to feel better. Once this date is reached, which can be for example three days, it is necessary to evaluate if progress has been made, even if the emotional suffering is still there.
It should be noted that this step is not mandatory, since in some cases the discomfort is not so intense as to require it, but it is advisable to follow it in order to have that symbolic reference that marks the beginning of the change.
4. Break the cycle
Once you have gone through the initial recovery stage, it is necessary to break the cycle of habits. to break the cycle of the habits associated with the discomfort..
To do this, undertake new routines and habits. Starting from scratch in something that we have not mastered but that we can find stimulating and that fits our capabilities allows us to train our attention span to gradually get used to stop focusing on the cause of suffering for love.
So, habits such as drawing, walking in new areas, training in a new sport, learning a language... are positive because if we modify our actions and our contexts, our mental processes also change.
In the case that one or more of the new habits are related to an idea of progress (as for example, when we set out to learn a language), it is necessary to have realistic expectations and to assume that our vulnerable emotional state will probably make us progress more slowly compared to how we would have done it if we always felt good.
5. Don't forget to socialize
Socializing with other people is positive because it allows us to express in words what we feel and because it also allows us to expose ourselves to stimulating situations that can attract new interests and concerns and "detach" us from suffering.
6. Keep healthy habits
This step has three basic pillars: sleep well, eat well and do moderate exercise. In this way, the state of the body will make the nervous system also predispose us to feel better and not to fall into anxiety and discomfort, something that happens among other things when the body sends us signals that something is wrong.
(Updated at Apr 13 / 2024)