How Can You Move on After Your Break-Up? – 5 Crucial Steps

1. Employ Healthy Distractions

To avoid dwelling on the heartache, it’s beneficial to find healthy distractions. This approach works well while surrounded by a group of friends.

For example, if you’re ecstatic about traveling, plan a getaway with your friends. Or if you’ve put an old hobby on the back burner, fire it up again. Whatever distraction you choose, it should make you feel positive.

Distractions work exceptionally well directly after breaking up, especially since your mind will probably swirl with thoughts about your ex-partner.

2. Delay the Dating Game

It’s not true that someone new will help you get over your partner. Mainly, jumping into the dating pool too soon will compound whatever issues you’re facing.

Each romance has its own set of unique challenges. After a break-up, what these challenges leave you with are emotional layers. If left unresolved, those layers and tendencies are carried into your next relationship. As a result, this approach only causes more and more problems.

Moving on after a break-up means taking a dating sabbatical for as long as you deem necessary—a month, six months, a year… or more.

3. Write It Down

Plenty of break-ups offer no closure whatsoever. A handful of examples include when your partner ghosts you or you exit a toxic relationship. Sometimes, a healthy break-up just isn’t possible because of your partner’s choices.

Unfortunately, not having closure is like walking around with an open wound on your body. It’s painful, and it can make you feel anxious, depressed, and angry.

To help you move on from a break-up, do your best to find closure on your own. Journaling can serve you well when it comes to sorting out emotions. Take time each day or every few days to write about how you feel. Write about the good and the bad aspects of your previous relationship.

Keeping track of your feelings helps you to locate them, for one. Plus, it also helps you to see your healing progress.

4. Surround Yourself with Support

Loneliness is one of the first emotional walls you may face after a break-up. When you connect intimately with another person, and suddenly the connection is gone, it can feel like hitting a brick wall. Also, you don’t stop loving someone the moment you break-up with them. Emotions tend to linger, no matter the situation.

To help keep your mind in a healthy place, surround yourself with positive friends and family. You don’t have to divulge why you need the additional support, but reach out for it nonetheless.

Positive connections help to ward off loneliness, and they can also lend you a new perspective on life. Instead of holing up behind a TV or under your covers, reach out to real-life people and benefit from socializing.

5. Develop New Personal Goals

Romantic relationships take a significant amount of work. Often, it can feel as though all your time and energy are given to your relationship. When it ends, you may feel purposeless.

Dedicating your time and energy to a relationship isn’t a bad thing, but it can knock your life aim off-kilter. Perhaps you have other endeavors you’d like to pursue—career goals, personal interests, fitness ideas, etc.

To move on from a break-up, take time to develop new personal goals for yourself. Without a partner, you have more freedom to choose what you genuinely want to do. Take advantage of that freedom, and let your heart heal along the way.