I have heard many advice on how long I should take to recover from a brake-up. Even romantic comedies touch on this issue regularly. The agreed rule seems to be that it is okay for recovery to take half the time of the relationship.
That seems a bit extreme. I don’t know about you but I wasn’t ready to waste years feeling blue. Heck, even one year seems to be too much. So long should a recovery last? As little as possible. Again, this might sound like a very simple idea but you need to truly understand that you are not obliged to anyone to feel sad. We are all different and every relationship is unique so if I was completely sure about anything in my life, it’s that there is no “rule of thumb” on how long it should take for you to recover from a brake up. |
It is completely natural to feel like shit for some time. I can tell you that my recovery took longer than I would have liked. For the first two weeks I felt completely ripped apart and destroyed. This doesn’t last because life goes on and you have to pick yourself up and go on living no matter how you feel. So next two weeks were already significantly easier and after three months I was at about 80 - 90 percent.
A number of factors make a huge impact on how long will your recovery take. Messy divorce would have made it harder and longer. Too be honest now I regret some of the decisions I made at that time as I wanted to get it over with as soon as possible. Anyways, stuff can be replaced. Don’t think that your brake up is special and extreme. It is unique, because you and your partner were both unique people but people have gone through much worse. Watched pot never boils. Don’t put yourself on timetables and don’t set yourself goals concerning how you must feel after a certain period of time. This is not like going to the gym and setting goals on how much you will be able to lift or run. Mind works in a bit different way. The only healthy thing you can do in order to make your recovery time as short as possible is to keep yourself busy. In this situation timetables have one huge problem - how can you measure your progress. When you try to loose some weight you have specific numbers that tell you how far you have gone and how far you should go. How can you measure your “I’m over the brake up”? |
You can pretty accurately measure how well you feel on a scale just like I did previously. You know how you feel than you are feeling good and you have plenty of experience to set “ok” and “bad” marks. That still leaves you in a pretty hopeless situation because you will be measuring your state but this state depends on many things.
You are not living In a vacuum so many other things happening around you influence how you feel and how you think. So it would be best to leave such attempts to measure your progress without wasting too much time on them. |
The only real way you will be able to measure your progress is by the lack of thoughts about your ex. It is completely normal to feel as if you can’t think about anything else. Brake up and ex can take all your waking and even your sleeping hours. I certainly wasn’t able to think about much else after my divorce.
As hard as it is to believe at that moment, maybe you are reading this in this state, but soon you won’t think about your ex at all. Don’t think that I repeat myself because I have memory issues. I repeat ideas that are the most important to get your head around at this time.
Time is the best medicine. Today all you can think about is your brake up and good times you had with your ex. Tomorrow and the day after these thoughts might be all you can think about but soon you’ll notice that these thoughts are not as common as before.
Sooner than later you’ll notice something amazing. You’ll go to sleep and a thought will cross your mind - “Wow, today I haven’t thought about him/her at all!”
Even during the first, hardest days you are not thinking about this issue all the time. Think about it. You had to think about going to buy some food and what you will eat. If you had to go to work, even if your productivity was decreased, still you had to do at least some work and in order to do that you had to think about task at hand.
Healing starts right away. Even if it doesn’t feel that way right now - every minute that passes puts distance between what happened and you.
As hard as it is to believe at that moment, maybe you are reading this in this state, but soon you won’t think about your ex at all. Don’t think that I repeat myself because I have memory issues. I repeat ideas that are the most important to get your head around at this time.
Time is the best medicine. Today all you can think about is your brake up and good times you had with your ex. Tomorrow and the day after these thoughts might be all you can think about but soon you’ll notice that these thoughts are not as common as before.
Sooner than later you’ll notice something amazing. You’ll go to sleep and a thought will cross your mind - “Wow, today I haven’t thought about him/her at all!”
Even during the first, hardest days you are not thinking about this issue all the time. Think about it. You had to think about going to buy some food and what you will eat. If you had to go to work, even if your productivity was decreased, still you had to do at least some work and in order to do that you had to think about task at hand.
Healing starts right away. Even if it doesn’t feel that way right now - every minute that passes puts distance between what happened and you.