How to Get Through a Breakup: Real People Share What Actually Helped Them Heal

Some are married now. Some are happily single. Some are dating again. But every one of them has had to figure out how to put themselves back together after love ended.

There is no shortage of advice about heartbreak.

Block them. Delete the pictures. Go to therapy. Get under somebody new. Stay single. Travel. Pray. Go to the gym. Cry until you can’t cry anymore.

Everyone seems to have a prescription for heartbreak—until they’re the one experiencing it.

Because when a relationship ends, you’re rarely grieving only a person. You may also be grieving routines, friendships, traditions, an imagined future, a version of yourself and sometimes an entire life you thought you were building.

So instead of asking an expert to tell us what heartbreak should look like, Platinum Gang Lifestyle asked everyday people what actually helped them get through it.

Some of the people we spoke with are married today. Some are happily single. Others have returned to dating. Their relationships and circumstances were different, but several themes appeared again and again.

And interestingly, psychology backs up quite a few of them.

First: Give Yourself Permission to Create Distance

One person didn’t hesitate when asked what helped most:

“Physically removing myself from the relationship and blocking access. Change gyms. Changing stores. Changing bedding.”

Sometimes healing requires changing your environment—not because you need to pretend the relationship never happened, but because it can be incredibly difficult to create a new chapter while continuously rehearsing the old one.

That doesn’t necessarily mean everyone needs to dramatically throw out their mattress, switch grocery stores and disappear from the face of the Earth.

But you are allowed to stop giving yourself unnecessary exposure to something that repeatedly sends you backward.

And that includes digital access.

You don’t need to check their Instagram to prove you’re healed.

You don’t need to see who they’re following.

You don’t need to reread the messages.

You don’t need to know whether they’re miserable without you.

You certainly don’t need to keep reopening a wound just to see whether it still hurts.

Research into romantic-breakup distress gives us another reason to take repetitive mental exposure seriously. A 2024 cross-cultural study published in the European Journal of Trauma & Dissociation examined rumination as a mechanism associated with romantic-breakup distress. The researchers found that rumination played a significant role in the relationship between anxiety and breakup distress across both North American and Argentinian samples.

Sometimes distance isn’t bitterness.

Sometimes it’s simply room to heal.

Find Something That Belongs to You Again

Another theme was almost universal: do something.

One person told us:

“Having something to focus on. I would always situate myself into a new chapter of life—usually fitness related. Or picking a new hobby. Even if it’s fucking coloring or reading, just anything so your thoughts are directed elsewhere.”

Another described it more simply:

“Staying busy and investing in myself. Getting things done.”

There is an important distinction here.

There is a difference between building a life and keeping yourself so frantically occupied that you never have to feel anything.

Distraction alone isn’t healing.

But purposeful activity can be valuable.

Behavioral activation, for example, is an established psychological approach that encourages people to intentionally reengage with meaningful and rewarding activities rather than remaining withdrawn. A Cochrane systematic review examined 53 studies involving 5,495 adults and concluded that behavioral activation may be an effective and acceptable treatment for depression, although researchers noted that certainty in some of the findings was limited. That research isn’t specifically a prescription for breakups, but it gives psychological context to the instinct to reengage with life when sadness makes you want to retreat from it.

So yes.

Take the class.

Start lifting weights.

Read the book.

Paint something terribly.

Go somewhere you’ve never been.

Get on the fucking plane.

Not because a plane ticket cures heartbreak.

Because your life needs experiences that have absolutely nothing to do with the person you lost.

Don’t Disappear From Everyone Who Still Loves You

This was perhaps the clearest point of agreement.

One person credited:

“Surrounding myself with people that love me.”

Another said:

“Leaning on my friends and family instead of isolating myself.”

And someone else emphasized the importance of friendships with people who understand that healing isn’t linear and don’t shame you for how long the process takes.

Heartbreak can make isolation tempting.

You don’t want to explain what happened again.

You don’t want everyone asking whether you’re okay.

You may not even recognize yourself yet.

But romantic love is only one form of love.

There is love in the friend who lets you tell the same story for the sixth time.

There is love in your mother’s kitchen.

There is love in your sibling dragging you outside.

There is love in someone sitting beside you while you cry without trying to fix you.

Losing one relationship doesn’t mean you’ve lost your capacity to be loved.

Accept That Healing Isn’t Linear

One of our respondents said something deceptively simple:

“Accepting that some days are harder than others. Don’t rush the process. It doesn’t happen in a straight line.”

Read that again.

You can have an incredible Saturday, wake up Sunday devastated and still be healing.

You can go three weeks without checking their page and suddenly want to look.

You can genuinely wish them well and still cry over what happened.

A difficult day does not erase every good day that came before it.

Even laboratory research on regulating feelings after a breakup suggests there may not be one emotional strategy that instantly accomplishes everything. In a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, researchers Sandra Langeslag and Michelle Sanchez studied people who were upset about a romantic breakup and tested three cognitive strategies: negative reappraisal of the ex-partner, reappraisal of their feelings of love, and distraction. The strategies affected participants’ feelings of love, mood and brain-measured emotional responses differently—suggesting that different forms of emotional regulation may accomplish different things during breakup recovery.

Human emotion is complicated.

Your healing is allowed to be, too.

For Some People, Faith Becomes an Anchor

When we asked what helped, one person answered first:

“Talking to God through prayer.”

And for someone whose faith is central to their life, heartbreak can become as much a spiritual experience as an emotional one.

Prayer doesn’t require you to pretend you’re okay.

Sometimes prayer is eloquent.

Sometimes it’s gratitude.

Sometimes it’s surrender.

And sometimes it’s simply:

God, I don’t understand this. Help me get through today.

Faith can provide somewhere to place the questions that don’t have answers yet.

It can also challenge the belief that the loss of one relationship means the loss of your future.

Maybe what ended wasn’t the end of your story.

Maybe it was simply the end of that chapter.

Be Careful About Romanticizing What Hurt You

One person offered an interesting approach to forgiveness: instead of constantly focusing on the pain, they intentionally remembered a happy period from the relationship and used it to move toward forgiveness.

That doesn’t mean rewriting a harmful relationship into a beautiful one.

And forgiveness does not require reconciliation.

It doesn’t mean what happened was acceptable.

It doesn’t require giving someone access to you again.

But there can be freedom in reaching a place where anger no longer requires your daily participation.

There is research behind that idea as well. A large multinational study led by researchers affiliated with the Harvard Human Flourishing Program and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health followed more than 200,000 people across 22 countries and examined forgiveness practices alongside numerous measures of well-being. Researchers found that greater forgiveness was associated over time with improvements particularly in psychological well-being, as well as some prosocial and character-related measures. Importantly, forgiveness was conceptualized as shifting away from ill will—not pretending the harm never occurred.

You can appreciate what was good.

Acknowledge what was terrible.

Learn from both.

And still leave.

Decenter Romantic Love for a While

One response deserves its own conversation:

“Start loving yourself the way you want your future partner to love you. Then when it comes time to pursue romantic love, the standards are higher because someone has to treat you better than you treat yourself.”

Whew.

There is a difference between wanting romantic love and constructing your entire life around obtaining it.

After a breakup, there can be an almost frantic desire to replace what disappeared.

Who am I talking to now?

Who am I spending weekends with?

Who tells me good morning?

Who takes me to dinner?

Who chooses me?

But perhaps this period isn’t asking you to find another person to choose you.

Perhaps it’s asking:

What does it look like when you choose yourself?

Go to the restaurant they never wanted to try.

Book something without waiting for somebody to accompany you.

Buy yourself flowers.

Build friendships.

Make your home beautiful.

Learn something.

Create traditions that don’t require a romantic partner.

Make your life so full that your next relationship becomes something beautiful you add to it, rather than the thing required to make it whole.

And Please Don’t Confuse Rumination With Healing

There is thinking about what happened.

And then there is mentally living there.

Why did they do it?

Did they ever love me?

What if I’d said something differently?

Are they happier with the next person?

Was I not enough?

At some point, searching for one more answer can become another way of maintaining the attachment.

Research examining breakup distress has specifically identified rumination—repetitive, persistent thinking about distress—as an important psychological factor associated with romantic-breakup distress. In the 2024 cross-cultural study mentioned earlier, rumination helped explain the relationship between trait anxiety and breakup distress in samples from both North America and Argentina.

You are allowed to stop solving a relationship that has already ended.

Closure isn’t always another conversation.

Sometimes closure is realizing that you have enough information to move forward even if you never receive every answer.

The Goal Isn’t to Become Someone Who Never Loved Them

Perhaps that’s where we misunderstand “getting over” someone.

The goal doesn’t have to be indifference.

You don’t need to hate them.

You don’t have to erase every photograph.

You don’t need to pretend the relationship meant nothing just because it didn’t last forever.

You can love what something was and recognize that it cannot come with you where you’re going.

You can miss someone without returning to them.

You can forgive someone without reopening the door.

You can remember someone without rebuilding your life around their memory.

And you can be devastated by an ending while simultaneously becoming someone you would never have become without it.

One person we spoke with put the entire conversation into a single sentence:

“Don’t let someone who was only part of your story become the author of the rest of your life.”

Maybe that’s what getting through a breakup actually is.

Not forgetting the chapter.

Taking the pen back.