Why Breakups Hurt So Much (And How to Actually Heal)
Breaking up with someone you love is one of the hardest things you’ll ever go through. It’s not just sad—it’s disorienting, exhausting, and sometimes physically painful. If you’ve ever felt like your chest was caving in or you couldn’t catch your breath after a breakup, you weren’t imagining it. There’s real science behind why heartbreak hurts so much, and understanding it can help you get through it.
Your Brain on Heartbreak
Here’s something that might surprise you: when scientists put people going through breakups into brain scanners, they discovered that emotional pain lights up the same parts of the brain as physical pain. This isn’t just a metaphor—when we say heartbreak “hurts,” we mean it literally.
Researchers at the University of Michigan studied people who’d recently gone through unwanted breakups. They had them look at photos of their ex-partners while being scanned in an fMRI machine. The brain regions that activated were the same ones that fire up when you burn your hand on a hot stove or stub your toe.
This explains why breakups can feel so overwhelming. Your brain is essentially treating the loss of your relationship like a physical injury. The intensity of what you’re feeling isn’t weakness or being “too sensitive”—it’s biology. Your brain evolved to keep you connected to others because, for most of human history, being alone could literally threaten your survival.
The Closure Myth
We’ve all heard it: “You need closure to move on.” But here’s the truth—closure is often a myth that keeps us stuck.
Think about it: how many times have you replayed conversations in your head, trying to find that one thing that would make everything make sense? How many times have you imagined a final conversation where everything would finally click into place?
Real healing doesn’t come from a perfect final conversation or a neat explanation. It comes from accepting that some things will never make complete sense, and that’s okay. Your relationship was probably both wonderful and flawed. Your ex-partner was both the person you loved and someone who couldn’t give you what you needed. Those contradictions don’t need to be resolved—they just need to be acknowledged.
Instead of chasing closure, what you actually need is integration. That means learning to hold two opposing truths at once: the relationship mattered deeply, and it’s over. The love was real, and it wasn’t enough. You can miss someone and still know that breaking up was the right choice.
Rewriting Your Story
When a relationship ends, it’s not just about losing a person—it’s about losing a whole future you’d imagined. All those plans you’d made together, the dreams you’d built, suddenly vanish. That loss can feel just as painful as losing the person themselves.
On top of that, you have to figure out who you are now. For months or years, you were half of “we.” Now you’re just “me” again—but not the same “me” you were before. You’ve changed. The relationship shaped you. And now you need to figure out how to be yourself without that person.
This is exhausting work. You’re essentially rewriting your life story in real-time. You have to reinterpret the past (what did that relationship actually mean?), understand your present (who am I now?), and reimagine your future (what’s possible now?).
Don’t rush this process. It’s tempting to quickly come up with a clean explanation for what happened—”they were wrong for me,” “I dodged a bullet,” “it was all a mistake.” But real understanding takes time. Sometimes the most honest answer to “what happened?” is “I’m still figuring it out.”
The Dance Between Alone and Together
After a breakup, you’ll probably swing between two contradictory needs: wanting to be completely alone and desperately needing to be around people.
Both of these feelings are valid and important.
Being alone gives you space to actually feel your feelings without having to perform being okay. It lets you rediscover parts of yourself that maybe got pushed aside in the relationship. It gives you privacy to cry, to rage, to sit with your pain without worrying about anyone else’s comfort.
But too much isolation can trap you in your grief. This is where friends and family become crucial—especially people who knew you before the relationship. They can reflect back to you that you’re more than just someone going through a breakup. They remind you that your identity exists beyond this one relationship.
The key is learning to recognize what you need in each moment. Sometimes answering your phone and meeting a friend for coffee is exactly right. Other times, staying home alone is the healthier choice. There’s no formula—just honest self-awareness about what will actually help you right now.
When Time Feels Broken
Time gets weird after a breakup. A single day can feel like it lasts forever, but somehow three months have passed in a blur. This isn’t just in your head—there’s a real psychological reason for it.
We live our lives oriented toward the future. We’re always moving toward something: next week’s plans, next year’s goals, the life we’re building. When a serious relationship ends, especially one where you’d built a shared future, that future suddenly doesn’t exist anymore. But you’re still moving forward in time.
This creates a strange sense of vertigo. You’re moving toward a future you can’t quite see yet because you’d been focused on a different future entirely. The life you thought you’d have—the trips you’d planned, the home you’d imagined sharing, growing old together—none of that will happen now. And grieving those unlived futures can feel just as real as grieving the actual past.
Healing means slowly developing a new relationship with the future. Not replacing the old future with a new one right away, but simply making the present moment more livable. Eventually, new possibilities will emerge. The old imagined future doesn’t disappear—it just becomes one of many roads not taken, gradually losing its emotional grip as you build a life that’s actually happening.
The Social Media Problem
Let’s be honest: one of the hardest parts of modern breakups is social media.
Previous generations could rely on physical distance and natural memory fading. If you wanted to know how your ex was doing, you’d have to actually run into them or hear through the grapevine. Now? They’re one click away, and their entire life is on display.
The compulsion to check their Instagram, scroll through their tweets, or look at who they’re following is incredibly strong. But every time you do it, you’re reopening the wound. You’re keeping yourself psychologically tied to someone who’s no longer part of your life.
Here’s what usually happens: you’re looking for one of two things. Either you want to see that they’re miserable (which would validate your own pain), or you want to see that they’re happy and thriving (which would somehow give you permission to move on). But neither discovery actually helps you heal. Both keep you focused on them instead of on yourself.
Consider taking a real break from their social media presence. Unfollow, mute, or even block if you need to. This isn’t about being petty or angry—it’s about protecting your own healing process. You can’t properly grieve and move forward if you’re constantly monitoring what they’re doing.
What About Staying Friends?
Should you stay in contact with your ex? It depends.
There’s no universal answer, and anyone who tells you there is doesn’t understand how complex relationships are. It depends on how long you were together, how intense the relationship was, how it ended, whether you share friend groups or work together, whether there are kids involved.
That said, research does suggest that periods of genuine no contact often help with healing. When you’re still in contact—even friendly contact—your brain’s attachment system stays partially activated. It’s like trying to let a wound heal while constantly picking at it.
If you find yourself constantly texting your ex, checking in “just as friends,” or staying connected out of habit rather than genuine friendship, you might need space. Real friendship with an ex is possible, but usually only after you’ve both had time to genuinely move on. If you’re still in pain, still hoping they’ll come back, or still feeling jealous, you’re probably not ready for friendship yet.
Can Heartbreak Make You Stronger?
It sounds like a cliché, but there’s truth to the idea that getting through heartbreak can actually make you more resilient.
This doesn’t mean the pain was “worth it” or happened “for a reason.” You don’t need to pretend there’s a silver lining or that everything happens for the best. But you can extract meaning from the experience.
- What did this relationship teach you about yourself?
- About what you need from a partner?
- About how you show up in relationships?
- Where did you compromise too much of yourself?
- Where were you not compromising enough?
- What patterns do you notice about how you love and want to be loved?
These aren’t easy questions, and you don’t need to answer them right away. But eventually, this kind of reflection turns a purely painful experience into one that helps you grow.
Beyond that, there’s something powerful about surviving something that felt unsurvivable. Each time you get through a day that felt impossible, each time you experience intense emotional pain and wake up the next morning still intact, you’re building evidence that you’re stronger than you knew. Not hardened or closed off—just more confident in your ability to endure difficult things.
Moving Forward Without Erasing the Past
One of the trickier aspects of healing is figuring out how to move forward without feeling like you’re betraying what you had.
If the relationship was meaningful and the love was real, how can you just “get over it”? Doesn’t healing somehow diminish what you shared?
Here’s the thing: healing doesn’t require pretending the relationship didn’t matter or that the love wasn’t real. You don’t honor a meaningful relationship by staying stuck in pain forever. You honor it by taking what it taught you and carrying that forward into your life.
Think of your life as a story that’s still being written. This relationship was an important chapter, but it’s not the whole book. The next chapters will be influenced by this one—the themes might carry forward, the lessons you learned will shape what comes next—but the story continues.
Finding Yourself Again
Ultimately, getting over a breakup is less about forgetting your ex-partner and more about remembering yourself.
Not the version of you that existed before the relationship—you can’t go back to that person, and you shouldn’t want to. You’ve grown and changed. But you need to rediscover who you are now: a person shaped by what you experienced, enriched by what you learned, but not defined by what you lost.
This takes time. There’s no way to rush it, despite what productivity culture might tell you. There are no life hacks for grief. What you need isn’t efficiency—it’s capacity and endurance. The willingness to keep going through days that feel pointless. The courage to feel your pain without letting it consume you. The patience to gradually build a life that makes sense again.
Healing begins not when you stop missing your ex, but when you notice that hours—then days—pass where you’re so genuinely engaged with your present life that you don’t think about them at all. When your attention naturally shifts from what you lost to what you’re building.
In The End
Breakups are hard. They hurt in ways that are both emotional and physical, neurological and psychological. They force you to reconstruct your identity, reimagine your future, and figure out who you are outside of “we.”
But you will get through this. Not because time heals all wounds—that’s too simple. But because you’re more resilient than you think. Because humans have an incredible capacity to adapt, to find meaning in pain, to build new lives from the rubble of old ones.
The relationship ended. You will survive. And eventually—maybe not soon, but eventually—you’ll look back on this period and recognize it as a time when you discovered just how strong you actually are. Not because the pain was worth it, but because you were equal to it.
Take it one day at a time. Be patient with yourself. Feel what you need to feel. Reach out when you need support. Take space when you need solitude. And trust that you’re doing exactly what you need to do, even when it doesn’t feel like enough.
You’re going to be okay. Not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday. And that someday starts with getting through today.
