If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve experienced a breakup. Breakups can be difficult depending on how long they’ve lasted and/or how much we’ve emotionally invested in the person. We can expect a period of grieving the loss, even if we know it should have ended. We need to take some time to process what happened that caused the relationship to end and learn from that experience. Here are therapist-recommended tips on how to get over a breakup:

1. Process what you’re walking away with rather than walking away without. This can look like thinking through, “What did I gain from this relationship?”, “What did I learn about myself?”, “What do I need to take note of for any potential relationships in the future?” Some possible answers to these questions may be: “I gained a lot more self confidence and the ability to be more self-sufficient.” “In the future, I want to make it clear how important time with my family is.” This can be a great journaling exercise.
2. This is a time for good self-care: proper nutrition, regular exercise, and healthy sleep patterns. Invest in activities that are meaningful and where you can express your gifts and talents in ways that are fulfilling. You will have more time to invest in others, so engaging in volunteer roles where you are serving and helping others can add meaning and increase the quality of your life.

How Long After a Breakup Is It Truly Over?

A breakup is truly over when you can think about your ex without emotional distress, when you have stopped hoping for reconciliation, and when your daily life is no longer organized around the loss. For most people, this takes approximately 3 to 6 months, though longer relationships often take longer to fully process.

A 2007 study of college students who had recently gone through breakups found that most participants felt significantly better by the 11-week mark. A separate consumer research study found an average recovery time of approximately 3.5 months. For divorce or the end of a long-term partnership, recovery timelines often extend to a year or more.

The process unfolds in phases rather than on a schedule. The acute distress phase typically lasts the first 2 to 4 weeks and includes intense emotional pain, disrupted sleep, and obsessive thoughts. This is followed by a grief and adjustment period lasting 2 to 6 months where the emotions become less overwhelming but are still present. The integration phase begins around the six-month mark, when most people start genuinely reinvesting in their own lives.

If you are well past these benchmarks and still feel stuck, that is a signal that the grief may need professional support to resolve. Grief counseling is not just for death-related loss. It is equally effective for processing the end of a relationship, especially when the loss is tied to identity, attachment, or unresolved conflict.

How to Grieve a Breakup

You grieve a breakup by allowing yourself to fully feel the loss rather than rushing past it, numbing it, or pretending you are fine. A breakup is a legitimate loss. It involves the loss of a partner, a future you planned, a daily routine, and sometimes a sense of identity. Treating it as something you should “just get over” delays the healing process.

The grief following a breakup mirrors the grief that follows any significant loss. You may experience shock, denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, and eventually acceptance. These do not happen in a neat sequence. They overlap, repeat, and sometimes hit all at once. A 2024 study published in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research found that writing about breakup emotions for just 15 minutes over three days reduced cortisol levels by 20%, confirming that actively engaging with the grief rather than avoiding it accelerates recovery.

Practical steps include allowing yourself designated time to feel the pain rather than fighting it all day, maintaining basic routines around sleep, food, and movement, and staying connected to at least one person who lets you talk without judgment. Removing or muting your ex on social media is not petty. It is one of the most effective things you can do during the early weeks.

If the grief feels like it is not moving or is getting worse over time, therapy can help. A trained therapist can help you process the specific aspects of the loss that are keeping you stuck, whether that is unresolved anger, guilt, attachment wounds, or the fear of being alone.

3. Be mindful of how you are processing the loss. If you feel inadequate, unlovable, not significant, etc., as a result of the break-up, it might be helpful to process these beliefs with a therapist so you don’t end up with a distorted and negative view of yourself. If you sink into long periods of depression, anxiety, or grief, you may also want to process this with a therapist to be able to work through these feelings and return to a more positive view of life.
4. Take a break from social media and spend more quality time with your most supportive friends. As humans, we require healthy attachments to others. Surrounding yourself with friends and loved ones (support system) can help soothe the attachment trauma. Also, allow yourself to grieve!! This is a loss and it is okay to feel it.

How to Cope with a Breakup When You Still Love Them

You cope with a breakup when you still love them by accepting that love and the decision to end a relationship can exist at the same time. Loving someone does not mean the relationship was working. Ending something you still care about is one of the most painful experiences a person can go through, and it is important to acknowledge that rather than fight it.

The brain processes romantic rejection in the same regions that process physical pain. Neuroscience research using fMRI scans has shown that viewing a photo of an ex-partner activates the same neural pathways as experiencing a physical injury. This is why breakup pain feels so visceral and why “just stop thinking about them” is not useful advice. The pain is real, neurologically measurable, and temporary.

What helps is creating physical and digital distance. Every point of contact, whether a text, a social media check, or driving past their home, reactivates the attachment system and resets the healing clock. Research on social support after breakups shows that emotional support (validation and empathy from people you trust) and informational support (guidance and perspective) both play a significant role in reducing depression and anxiety during recovery.

Allow yourself to grieve the relationship without vilifying yourself for still having feelings. The love does not need to disappear before the healing can begin. Attachment therapy can be especially helpful if you notice patterns of intense attachment or difficulty letting go that repeat across relationships.

What Should You Not Do During a Breakup?

During a breakup, you should not isolate yourself completely, make impulsive major life decisions, use alcohol or substances to numb the pain, obsessively check your ex’s social media, or rush into a new relationship before you have processed the loss. These are the most common behaviors that extend the recovery timeline and create new problems.

Contacting your ex repeatedly is one of the most counterproductive things you can do during the early weeks. Each conversation reopens the wound and resets the brain’s detachment process. Research on breakup recovery consistently shows that a clean break with minimal contact leads to faster emotional recovery than an extended period of negotiation, friendship attempts, or on-and-off communication.

Rebound relationships also carry risk. While they may provide temporary distraction and validation, they rarely address the underlying grief. Entering a new relationship before processing the last one often means you bring unresolved pain, unexamined patterns, and unrealistic expectations into the new connection.

The best thing you can do during a breakup is protect your basic needs: sleep, food, movement, and connection with people who care about you. Give yourself permission to feel terrible without making permanent decisions while you are in the worst of it. Depression therapy can help if the sadness becomes persistent and is interfering with your ability to function at work, in relationships, or in daily life.

5. Accept that feelings of sadness and loneliness are a normal part of any life change and they are not a signal that you should ‘be with’ the person who you are experiencing the break up with. Many people confuse sadness for a reason to continue on in that relationship. Remember, even people who struggle with substance abuse disorder crave their desired substance for a period of time after ‘quitting.’ Not everything we desire aligns with our higher goals and well being!
   
   

   Photo by Andre Hunter

How to Accept That a Relationship Is Over

You accept that a relationship is over by allowing yourself to sit with the finality of the loss rather than bargaining, replaying scenarios, or holding onto the hope that things will change. Acceptance does not mean you are happy about the breakup. It means you have stopped fighting reality.

Acceptance is the last stage of grief for a reason. It usually cannot be forced or rushed. The brain needs time to update its model of the world, to stop expecting your partner to be there, to stop reaching for your phone to share something with them, and to stop planning a future that includes them. Each time the brain reaches for the old pattern and finds it gone, it slowly rewires.

Specific actions that support acceptance include removing daily reminders (photos, shared playlists, gifts in visible places), stopping all “checking” behavior on social media, and beginning to rebuild a routine that is entirely your own. Creating new rituals, a different coffee shop, a new walking route, rearranging your living space, helps the brain form new associations that do not include your ex.

If you have been stuck in the bargaining or denial phase for months, a therapist can help you identify what is keeping you there. Sometimes the difficulty accepting a breakup is less about the relationship and more about a deeper fear of being alone, a pattern of anxious attachment, or unresolved grief from earlier losses. Grief counseling helps you work through the specific barrier that is blocking acceptance.

Does Love Ever Go Away After a Breakup?

Yes, love does go away after a breakup for most people, but it does not disappear overnight and it does not always vanish completely. What happens is that the intense, consuming quality of the love gradually fades and is replaced by something quieter, sometimes fondness, sometimes neutrality, sometimes nothing at all.

Neuroscience helps explain why. When you are in a relationship, the brain creates strong dopamine and oxytocin pathways associated with your partner. After a breakup, those pathways remain active for a while, which is why you continue to feel pulled toward your ex even when you know the relationship is over. Over time, without new reinforcement, those pathways weaken through a process neuroscientists call synaptic pruning. The brain literally dismantles the neural connections that sustained the attachment.

For most people, the shift happens gradually over 3 to 12 months. You may notice one day that you have gone an entire week without thinking about them. Then a month. The absence of pain is often the first sign that the love has started to transform. It does not always become nothing. Some people carry a quiet fondness for an ex for years, and that is normal as long as it does not interfere with their present life.

If love for an ex feels as intense today as it did the day the relationship ended, and months or years have passed, that may indicate an unresolved attachment issue rather than enduring love. Online therapy provides a private, flexible space to explore why you are stuck and what it would take to genuinely move forward. At Counseling and Wellness Center of Pittsburgh, we help people process relationship loss at every stage, from the raw first weeks to the lingering feelings that just will not let go.

While it may not happen as quickly as you’d like, people have a resounding ability to heal from loss, regain autonomy and grow stronger. If you feel stuck or like it may be taking you longer than what feels appropriate, it may be helpful to reach out to a therapist for additional support.

Cover photo by Alex Green