How to fall out of love with someone: 4 scientific tips

If you can't get that person out of your mind... here are a few tips.

Love has always been defined as something that we can't control.. It comes, like a meteorological phenomenon, affects us in a way that depends on our personality and our experience with past relationships, and sometimes it goes away.

However, there are times when feeling love for certain people is clearly counterproductive and we know that, although it is in our best interest to stop feeling that kind of affection for someone, that is an option that is beyond our possibilities. Despite this, there are certain habits and behaviors that make it more likely that we will end up falling out of love with someone.

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When falling out of love is the best option

As crude as it may sound, letting go of love for someone can even be good for your health. It is, clearly, in those cases in which there is a toxic relationship in which abuse and physical and verbal violence are common, but also in those in which there is unrequited love.

The point is that the course of our thoughts does not always go in the direction that we desire or that produces greater well-being. Much of this is because those memories, ideas and images that come under the focus of our consciousness tend to escape our control.

We can decide more or less on which details or aspects to focus our attention, but the subjects that occupy our minds are not usually chosen by us. Or, rather, we choose to call up certain memories and analyze them, but we do not have the full power to make we do not have the full power to make them go away.Nor can we prevent them from occasionally coming to us by surprise: that is part of the normal functioning of our brain.

However, that this is normal does not mean that, under certain circumstances, this phenomenon of memories that come to our minds, can not become real headaches, especially if those memories have to do with past relationships, heartbreaks and heartbreak, especially if those memories have to do with past relationships, heartbreaks and heartbreak..

So, how do we take action? Saying that we want to fall out of love is easier said than done, but that does not mean that it is impossible to make this kind of feeling weaken in favor of our well-being and personal autonomy. Below you can read some keys to achieve this.

1. Regulate physical and visual contact

Looking into each other's eyes and touching are two situations: both cause our body to trigger the production of oxytocin, a hormone related to affection and the establishment of bonds of trust. In turn, an increased amount of oxytocin in our Blood and in the spaces through which the neurons of our brain communicate cause the emotions and behaviors related to love to appear. In fact, this happens even when looking into the eyes of certain pets.

Therefore, one of the first steps to disengage from a person whose relationship we find harmful is to to make this physical and visual contact poorer and more scarceeven if at that moment we feel like doing the opposite.

2. Learn to live away from that person

Another important aspect at the time of falling out of love is to to make things easy for ourselves at the beginning by avoiding having to see that person, at least for a few days or weeks.. If love consists, among other things, in thinking about that person for a good part of the hours of the day, to reverse this dynamic it is good not to expose ourselves to situations in which we have to think about her by force because we have her in front of us.

In many ways, love works like a drug, since both when we see the person we love and when we consume an addictive substance, the reward circuit of our brain is activated, based especially on the neurotransmitter called dopamine.

Therefore, gradually reducing the number of times this is activated will be necessary for our brain to re-accommodate to the new lifestyle. Although, yes, this is something that is hard to do and requires effort. That is why before undertaking this task it is good to imagine a priori possible excuses that we can give ourselves to go to see that person; in this way we will be able to recognize them as such when they appear.

3. Resume routines that make us independent

To rebuild a life as a person away from the person we used to think about, it is not only necessary to stop thinking about that person, but also to find activities to prevent this from happening. find activities to prevent this from happening. If we do all the things we did when we were in love, our brain will notice that the only missing piece of the puzzle is the presence of that person, and this incongruity will give us problems. On the other hand, if we make the distance from that person coincide in time with other significant changes in our life that are related to our routine, it will be easier for us to commit to this transition phase.

In addition, inventing new ways of living day to day will make it more likely that we will consider activities that have little to do with the life of a person in love, so that the possibilities of thinking about the person for whom we had feelings diminish: simply, the references to him or her will be scarcer.simply, the references to him or her will be more scarce.

In short, in the style of what behaviorist psychologists such as B. F. Skinner proposed, if we want to do something about the person we love, we will have to think about him or her. F. Skinner, if we want to make our life change, we can take into account that the most important thing is to make the environment and the activities to which we are exposed change, rather than trying to modify ourselves without moving a muscle.

4. Work on self-esteem

Sometimes, the failure of the project of relationship with someone supposes a hard blow for the self-esteem.. That is why to the previous behavioral guidelines we must add a constant evaluation of our self-image and self-esteem. If not, it is easy that, feeling that we are not valid as people, we desperately seek to get back together with the other person, in order to better accept ourselves.

For this, it is necessary to try to make an analysis as cold and distanced as possible of who we are, what we do and what defines us, taking into account the events we have lived through. In other words, it is not a matter of thinking of ourselves as entities independent of our environment: what is important is to realize how we behave with the means we have and depending on our objectives and interests.

Managing attention

Having read these keys to falling out of love with someone, you may have noticed that almost all of them are based on a common theme: attention. Knowing how to manage our attentional focus makes us concentrate on those things that are really necessary or useful to us and, therefore, helps us to move away from rumination, a process similar to a vicious circle. vicious circle by which almost everything we do or perceive reminds us of what makes us feel bad: as we feel sad, we think about what causes that, and as we think about what causes that, we feel sad.

So, the key is to intervene on both our thoughts and our actions to break this seemingly endless loop of comparisons and sadness. Start imposing a certain discipline on ourselves in what we do, even if our body asks us to do something else, is fundamental to stop being emotionally dependent on that person we fell in love with one day. And, of course, if we believe that the problem is so intense that it totally interferes with our quality of life, it is worth considering whether it is convenient to to go to psychotherapy sessions. In any case, the engine of change should always be ourselves.