The Benefits of Mindfulness for Surviving a Painful Break-Up

If your partner ends your relationship and breaks your heart, you will grieve. Your grieving process may be especially lengthy and painful if you were together for many years, your lives were tightly intertwined, your partner unilaterally and/or suddenly ended it, or your partner betrayed your trust.

When your heart is broken, it is normal and natural to

• Feel disoriented and emotionally dysregulated,
• Painfully ruminate on what went wrong,
• Question what you could’ve done differently,
• Wonder about the possibility of reuniting
• Peer anxiously into an unknown, unexpected future

To survive this arduous journey from brokenness to healing, you and your grieving brain can benefit from engaging in a variety of mindfulness practices.

Here are three particularly effective mindfulness practices you can try.

1. Mindfully Bring Awareness to Your Breath

Mindful breathing is a powerful way to reduce your distress. When you focus on your breath, you are not regretting, living in, or wishing for the past, nor are you worried about the future. Whenever you want to calm yourself, your mind will still wander, but repeatedly and mindfully returning your attention to your breath in the present moment can ground you in your current reality, where yes, there is pain, but the present moment is also where it’s possible to move along the continuum of healing and reinventing your life. Find mindful breathing meditations online, and perhaps start and end your days with the ones you find soothing. This method of self-care boosts your brain's ability to process and cope with your pain.

2. Mindfully Question Your Stories

We are all prone to concocting negative stories about what's happening to us. These stories can arise from a negative mindset that focuses on painful past experiences, pessimistic assumptions, and catastrophic thinking about the future. And as you dwell on the negative, these thoughts trigger painful feelings. For example, you might be telling yourself the story, “I’ll never get over this,” which can give rise to thoughts such as, "I must get them back;" "I'll be miserable forever;" "I'm not worthy of love;" or "I'm destined to die alone." In turn, these negative thoughts lead to painful feelings-- perhaps desperation, anxiety, fear, shame, hopelessness, and despair. And you suffer.

To reduce your suffering, whenever you notice you're in pain, stop and identify the negative story you’re telling yourself about what happened, what’s happening now, or what will happen. Mindfully observe your negative, pessimistic thoughts and how they are connected to your painful feelings. Then question whether your story is actually true or not.

Using the example above, can you know for a fact that you'll "never get over this?" Do you want it to be true? Does it feed a habit of playing the victim or feeling self-righteous? Or can you consider how your thoughts of desperation, misery, worthlessness, and isolation might be distortions of reality? And can you see how a negative story hinders positive healing?

Instead, can you entertain the possibility that you are actually resilient, which is a universal human trait? Can you mindfully become aware that even though you are indeed miserable in the present moment, this too shall pass? Try reassuring yourself (as you would do for a heartbroken friend) with the more realistic story that they are gone, and therefore you are better off without them; you can seek comfort from people who support you, and eventually, you will adjust and reinvent your life. And that in this present moment of darkness, you're simply having trouble seeing evidence of support, abundance, your worth, and your resilience.

It's normal to struggle with envisioning options, possibilities, healing, and light. But you can practice mindfully telling yourself the true story, which is "I got this! Healing takes time. This is hard, but I can prevail." Practice telling yourself that positive story, so you can build more positive neural pathways, experience more positive feelings, strengthen your resilience, and boost healing.

3. Mindfully Reclaim Your Power

Mindfully observing your thoughts and feelings, questioning your stories, redirecting your attention, and self-regulation can help you realize that you have the power to make choices instead of living on autopilot.

• Can you calm your brain with mindful breathing?
• Can you strive toward letting go of the fantasy of "what might have been" and accepting the reality of "what is?"
• Can you go with the flow of your grief by observing painful thoughts and feelings as they come and go, without judgment or attachment?
• Can you reduce your suffering by questioning your distressing stories about your experiences, yourself, and your future?
• Can you practice self-compassion, giving yourself grace and encouragement as you grieve and struggle to adjust?
• Can you choose to spend time doing what nurtures you and your grieving brain?
• Can you grab this opportunity to stretch, grow, and reinvent your life?

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When you’re ready, you might also find it helpful to recognize that yes, your ex destroyed your relationship—but are you going to let them destroy you as well? Reclaiming your power can motivate you to get up, dust yourself off, and start all over again, instead of succumbing to defeat. After all, living well can be your best revenge.

How Does Mindfulness Benefit You?

To understand the power of mindfulness, it can be illuminating to look at the neuroscience. In recent years, research has confirmed the value of mindfulness practices for boosting overall well-being. For example,

• Mindfulness meditation, yoga, and tai chi can produce relaxed-state brain waves and increase activity in parts of the brain associated with attention, memory, and emotional processing, which can help you restore your ability to reorient to your new reality, focus on tasks, and find emotional equilibrium.
• Mindfulness practices, such as gratitude and self-compassion, can physically rewire your brain and restore beneficial connections between neural networks that become disconnected due to trauma. This rewiring and restoration can soften the ravages of grief and trauma, reducing your suffering and helping you recover your ability to function.
• Following a six-week training in daily mindfulness meditation, brain imaging can actually show structural changes that increase stress reactivity threshold, which decreases emotionally flooding, thus reducing the painful physical and emotional effects of stress and trauma.
• Clinically, mindfulness practices are shown to be effective treatments for anxiety, depression, trauma, stress, hostility, and attention deficits. These practices also reduce blood pressure and boost immune system function, and generally help you heal.

Mindfulness doesn't erase your grief nor does it eliminate your need to stretch and grow as you reinvent your life. Rather, mindfulness supports your grieving brain by offering you some breathing room, easing your suffering, and helping you tend to your grief, adjustment, and transformation with loving care.