I still remember the exact spot on my kitchen floor where I sat, back against the cabinets, eating cereal straight from the box at 11pm because a breakup had wrecked my appetite for anything resembling a real meal. That particular heartbreak happened years before I met my husband, and honestly, I think about that version of myself a lot. Not because the relationship mattered so much in the grand scheme of things, but because of what I did (and didn’t do) to get through it.
Heartbreak is one of those things nobody can talk you out of feeling. It just has to move through you. But there’s a real difference between processing pain and just marinating in it, or worse, numbing it out completely. Over the years, through my own breakups and through watching friends go through theirs, I’ve collected a list of things that actually help. Not “get over it in a week” tricks, because that’s not how grief works, but genuine, healthy ways to let the heartbreak do its work on you without letting it wreck you. Here are the ten that I keep coming back to.
1. Let yourself actually feel it, on a schedule
This sounds counterintuitive, but hear me out. Suppressing the sadness doesn’t make it disappear, it just delays it and usually makes it worse later. At the same time, marinating in it 24/7 isn’t sustainable either. What worked for me was giving myself permission to fully feel the grief, cry, journal, listen to the sad songs, but within a container. Ten minutes in the morning, twenty minutes before bed. It sounds rigid, but it actually gave me a sense of control when everything else felt chaotic.
2. Move your body, even when you don’t want to
I am not a “just go for a run and you’ll feel better” person in general, because sometimes that advice is tone deaf. But there is something real about how movement processes stored emotion. Heartbreak lives in your body, your chest, your stomach, your shoulders. A walk around the block, a yoga class, even just stretching on your bedroom floor while you cry, it helps metabolize the feeling instead of letting it calcify into something stuck.
3. Lean on your people, but choose them wisely
Not everyone in your life is equipped to hold space for heartbreak well. Some friends will rush you toward “moving on,” some will trash-talk your ex in a way that feels good for five minutes and empty after. Find the friends who can just sit with you in it, who will let you repeat the same story for the fifth time without getting impatient. Those people are gold, and heartbreak has a way of showing you exactly who they are.
4. Write the unsent letter
I have written so many letters I never sent. Angry ones, sad ones, ones that were basically just lists of every memory I couldn’t stop replaying. There’s something about putting it on paper that gets it out of the loop in your head. You’re not trying to convince your ex of anything; you’re just trying to empty yourself of the words that keep circling. Burn it, shred it, delete it. The point was never to send it.
5. Get curious instead of just angry or sad
At some point, usually not right away, it helps to shift from purely feeling the heartbreak to gently examining it. What did this relationship teach you about what you need? Where did you lose yourself a little? This isn’t about blaming yourself, and it’s definitely not the move in week one. But eventually, treating the breakup like it has something to teach you turns pain into insight, which is a much better place to eventually land.
6. Protect your sleep like it’s sacred
Heartbreak insomnia is brutal, that thing where your brain decides 2am is the perfect time to replay every conversation. I started treating my sleep like a non-negotiable appointment: phone out of the room, a wind-down routine, even melatonin on the really bad nights. Poor sleep makes every emotion louder and every intrusive thought stickier. Protecting rest isn’t indulgent, it’s foundational to actually healing instead of just surviving.
7. Create something, anything
I’m not a particularly artistic person, but during my worst heartbreaks I have painted badly, written terrible poetry, and once reorganized my entire closet by color at 1am. There’s something about channeling the emotional intensity into making something, even something nobody will ever see, that gives the pain somewhere productive to go. It turns the energy of heartbreak from destructive into generative, even if the output is objectively not good.
8. Set a “no contact, but be honest with yourself about why” rule
This one is hard. Checking their social media, reading old texts, driving past places you used to go together, these things feel like they’ll bring relief, but they almost always reopen the wound. I’m not saying never look, I’m saying be honest about what you’re doing. If you catch yourself doomscrolling their profile, name it out loud: “I am doing this because I miss them, and it is going to hurt in about ten minutes.” That little bit of self-honesty made it so much easier to catch myself and close the app.
9. Reconnect with who you were before the relationship
Somewhere in a serious relationship, especially a long one, you tend to fold parts of yourself into the shape of “we.” Heartbreak, as awful as it is, gives you the strange gift of remembering who you were on your own. I went back to hobbies I’d dropped, called friends I’d let slide, rediscovered how much I liked spending a Saturday completely alone. It doesn’t erase the pain, but it reminds you that you are a whole person independent of who loved you or didn’t.
10. Let time actually be part of the plan
This one isn’t really an action, it’s a mindset shift, but it might be the most important one. Healthy heartbreak processing includes accepting that some of it just takes time, and that’s not a failure on your part. You don’t have to have “moved on” by any particular deadline. Give yourself the months it might take without treating your own timeline as evidence that something is wrong with you. Healing on a slower timeline is still healing.
My husband likes to remind me, whenever I’m going through something hard now, that the woman he fell in love with was shaped in part by every heartbreak that came before him, the cereal-on-the-kitchen-floor one included. He’s held me through plenty of hard emotional moments since we got together too, not romantic heartbreak, but grief and disappointment and all the other ordinary hard things life throws at you. What I learned back then, about feeling things fully without letting them consume me, is still what I lean on now, just with a much better support system standing next to me.
If you’re in the middle of heartbreak right now, I’m sorry. It’s genuinely one of the hardest human experiences. But I promise you, processing it in these healthier ways instead of numbing it or drowning in it will get you to the other side not just intact, but a little wiser about yourself than you were before. That version of you sitting on the kitchen floor, whoever she is, is going to be okay.
