Still Thinking About Your Ex? (Use This 2-Step Reset to Stop the Spiral for Good!)

have no business listening to. Right now you know which ones, the ones that you basically turned into a soundtrack for a movie about the two of you, your relationship, a movie that's much better than the relationship actually was. You've been checking their Instagram. Maybe not their main feed, you're smarter than that, but their stories for sure at one am trying to figure out who that person in the

background of the photo is. You've been having conversations with them in your head, long, articular, emotionally devastating conversations where you finally say everything you should have said, and they finally understand and something resolves, and then you come back to reality and they haven't texted, and somehow that hurts

more the imaginary conversation. You've been doing, the math how many days since you last spoke, whether they're thinking about you, what they're doing, right now, whether the thing you said in that argument three months before the end was the thing that actually ended it. And in your most honest moments, the three am ones or the Tuesday afternoon ones when you're supposed to be working, you've been telling yourself a story. Story goes something like this. It was so good. I've

never felt that way before. I don't know if I'll ever feel that way ever again. Maybe we gave up too soon. Maybe they were the one. I'm going to need you to sit with me for thirty minutes today because I need to tell you something about that story, about your brain, about what's actually happening when you romanticize your ex, when you romanticize someone you've lost, and about what's waiting for you on the other side of this spiral, if you're willing to walk through it rather than loop

it around forever. It's not a You'll be fine peptal. This is not toxic positivity wearing a therapy speak costume. This is the real thing, the neuroscience, the psychology, the ancient wisdom, and the practical tools. Because you deserve the actual truth more than you deserve to feel temporarily soothed. Ready, let's go. This is the harsh truth your brain is

lying to you, and I want to share with you the neuroscience of why they seem perfect now that they're gone. Let's start with the most important thing. The person you are missing does not exist, doesn't exist anymore, not exists, but is different now, not exists, but is with someone else. The specific person you're currently grieving, the one who appears in the photos you keep returning to, the one who

stars in the mental highlight reel. You keep playing the one who felt irreplaceable and perfect and like coming home. That person is a construction, a story brain is telling you, and your brain right now is a profoundly unreliable narrator. Here's why. When we experience loss, the brain does something that is genuinely astonishing from a neuroscience perspective and genuinely cruel from a human one. It edits memory is not a recording. We have known this in psychology for decades,

but it runs counter to how memory feels. We experience our memories as faithful replications of what happened. They'renot. Every time you retrieve a memory, you're not playing it back, You're reconstructing it. And every reconstruction is influenced by your current emotional state, your current needs, and your current narrative

about who you are and what your life means. This was established definitively by the cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, one of the most important and most underappreciated scientists of the twentieth century. Her research on memory distortion showed that human memory is extraordinarily malleable. We had details that weren't there, We removed details that were there. We unconsciously rewrite what happened to fit what we believe, what we feel, and what we need to be true. Now apply that to

a relationship you've just lost. Your brain is in a state of loss, and in a state of loss, the brain is a very specific and predictable bias. It amplifies the positive and suppresses the negative in memories of what was lost. This is not a quirk, This is not weakness. This is a documented neurological phenomenon. The moments of warmth, connection, laughter,

and intimacy get vivid. The chronic pattern of dismissal, the way they made you feel small in front of their friends, the way they went cold when you needed the most, The Sunday arguments that always circled the same drain, those get fuzzy, dimmed, explain away. You end up remembering a relationship that was approximately forty percent better than the one you actually had. And here's the other thing happening in

your brain. Simultaneously. When you were in the relationship, your brain's reward system, the dopamine circuits, adapted to the presence of your partner. They became a predicted reward, something your brain had learned to anticipate and plan around. When the relationship ends, that reward prediction is suddenly violently disrupted. And the disruption of a predicted reward is neurologically identical to withdrawal.

This is not metaphor. Researchers at Rutgers University Helen Fisher and her colleagues put people who had recently been rejected in romantic relationships into an fMRI scanner and showed them photos of their ex This will shock you. The brain regions that activated were the same ones that activate in cocaine addiction. The ventral tegmental area, the obsessive thinking, the physical ache, the craving, the compulsive checking behavior. These are not signs of how deep your love was. They are

signs of withdrawal. You're not pining for a person, you're detoxing from a neurochemical And here's where it gets even more interesting and more uncomfortable. The brain doesn't just romanticize by boosting the positive memories. It also uses a mechanism called deprivation amplification. Things we cannot have become more desirable, not despite their unavailability, but because of it. The psychological

literature calls this reactance. When something is taken away, we instinctively want it more, independent of how much we actually wanted it before. Think about that for a second. You might be partially in love with the unavailability itself. You might be confusing the ache of deprivation, the biological screaming of a reward system that's been cut off, with evidence of exceptional, irreplaceable love. Not because you're foolish, but because you're human. There's a line I think about all the

time from Victor Frankel between stimulus and response. There is space. In that space is our power to choose our response. Understanding what's happening in your brain right now is that space. It is the difference between being controlled by that neurological process and being able to look at it, name it, and make a different choice. So let's look at the other thing your brain is doing. Let's look at the story.

The story you're telling is fiction. There's a difference between your highlight reel and the full picture. There's a concept in cognitive behavioral therapy called selective abstraction, the tendency to focus on one element of a situation while ignoring the broader context. To take a fragment and let it represent the whole. We do this all the time, right you judge someone based on your first interaction in plain language, you're watching the trailer for your relationship, not the film.

The trailer trailers, as you know, are masterpieces of selective editing. Have you ever been to the theaters and you watch a trailer before the movie that you're going for, and then you think, well, I can't wait to watch that movie. Then you watch that movie and every joke was in the trailer, every action moment was in the trailer, every beautiful romantic moment was in the trailer, and the movie

was average. Every great line, every beautiful image, every moment of connection and tenderness and electricity cut together to make you want to see the movie. The trailer for a mediocre film can make it look like the most important cinematic experience of your lifetime. If you've just gone through a breakup, this is what your brain is doing. It has cut a three minute trailer for a two year relationship, and you have watched that trailer so many times that

you've started to believe the trailer is the relationship. So I want to do something with you that's going to be uncomfortable, and I want you to do it honestly. I want you to watch the full film, not to be cruel, not to demonize them or to erase what was really good, but because you cannot make clear eye decisions about your own recovery, about whether you should reach out, about whether this deserves to be mourned or released, about

what you actually want. If you're working from a distorted source, think about the thing that ended it, Not the surface event, the argument, the moment, the conversation, the actual underlying pattern, the pattern that kept reasserting itself, that you kept hoping would change that never quite did. What was it was it that they made you feel like an afterthought, that your needs were inconvenient that they were emotionally unavailable in

a way that made you work constantly for reassurance. You should have just been given that there was always something more important than you, the job, the friends, the general principle of their independence, or was it something in you, a pattern of your own that this relationship was surfacing and anxious attachment style that turned you into someone you didn't like, a habit of losing yourself in someone else until you couldn't find the edges of where you ended

and they began. Whatever the pat was, it was real, It was consistent, and it did not go away, and if you got back together tomorrow, it would still be there, still consistent, still real, with the added weight of everything that's happened since. One of my favorite Buddhist teachings is this, you cannot step in the same river twice. The river changes and you change as well. What you're trying to

return to doesn't exist anymore. The relationship of the highlight reel is not a place you can go back to. It was barely even a place you were actually at.

Psychologist John Gottman, who has spent forty years studying couples, identified what he calls the full horsemen of relationship failure, contempt, criticism, defensiveness, and Stonewall and his research found that by the time relationships end, these patterns have usually been present and consistent

for an average of six years before the breakup. Six years, which means you probably have evidence, memories, feelings, moments that the relationships had these patterns for a long time, but those memories are now fuzzy, explained away, rewritten as misunderstandings or your fault, or understandable given their circumstances, because your editing brain has decided the relationship was better than it was. I'm not saying it wasn't real. I'm not saying it

didn't matter. I'm not saying there wasn't love or beauty or genuine connection. There probably was. And that's what makes it harder, not easier, because you're not mourning a lie. You're mourning something that had real value and real limitations simultaneously, and the human brain finds that complexity almost impossible to hold. Here's the questions I want you to ask yourself after a breakup. Who were you when you were in that relationship?

Were you more yourself or less yourself? Were you growing toward who you want to be or were you just tolerating, accommodating, shrinking or performing. Were you genuinely seen or were you constantly trying to be seen and often failing. Because your answer to that question tells you something far more important than whether they were wonderful. It tells you whether the

relationship was actually good for you. Now here's what you're actually grieving, and surprisingly, it's not them, it's something much older.

This is the part of the episode where I need you to stay with me, because this is the hardest part and also the most important. When someone comes to me or a trusted friend and says, I can't stop thinking about my ex. I think I made a mistake. I think they were the one. There is almost always something underneath the grief about the specific person that doesn't get examined, because grief is not simple, and romantic grief is almost never just about the person in front of you.

The psychologist and attachment researcher Sue Johnson has spent her career studying what happens in the nervous system when intimate connection is threatened or lost, and what she found is that adult romantic attachment doesn't operate in isolation. It operates on the top of the entire architecture of attachment you've been building since you were an infant. When your earliest caregivers were consistent and responsive, you developed what's called a

secure attachment style. You learned at the level of the nervous system, programming before language even existed, that people are safe, that you're worthy of love, and that separation is temporary. That you can let people go and they will come back, or if they don't, you will survive and find connection again. When your earliest caregivers were inconsistent or absent, or overwhelming

or emotionally unavailable, you developed a different program. You might have anxious attachment, the constant background hum that love is precarious, that you have to work to maintain it, that the other person's withdrawal is evidence that you've done something wrong. Or avoidant attachment, the learned belief that needing people is dangerous, that you're better off not needing, that closeness is a trap. Most people reading this, most people doing the three A

M spiral, are not just grieving a relationship. They are re experiencing a very old wound. The grief about this person is a portal into a grief that has been sitting in the body for much longer. The anxious attached person isn't just missing their ex. They are re experiencing every moment in childhood when love felt conditional, when approval could be earned, and then suddenly withdrawn, when they tried

their very hardest and it still wasn't enough. The avoidant person who is pretending to be fine and yet finds themselves inexplicably devastated isn't just managing a breakup. They are brushing against the thing They have spent their whole life, running from, the terrifying evidence that they needed someone and then lost them. I'm not saying this to psycho analyze you, but to offer something critical compassion for the scale of what you're actually carrying. Stop hating yourself for not getting

over your ex. You're not weak because this is so hard. You're not pathetic because you can't stop thinking about them. You're a person who formed a deep attachment that is connected to something much larger and older and more foundational than this one relationship, and when that attachment is disrupted, the pain reaches all the way down into that original wound.

A shocking is this sounds this is actually good news because it means the healing you do right now, if you can do it properly, if you do it honestly, is not just about getting over this person. It is about attending to something that is needed attention for a very long time. This breakup, as terrible as it feels,

is also an invitation. The zen teacher Pay My Children writes about something she calls groundlessness, the terrifying experience of having the floor fall away from under you, of being in free fall with nothing solid to grab, and she argues counterintuitively provocatively that groundlessness is not a problem to

be solved. It is the most spiritual condition available to a human being, because when the ground falls away, you discover whether you are standing on solid ground at all, or whether you are standing on the illusion of someone else holding you up. The spiral of romanticizing your ex is at its core, the desperate attempt to find the floor again, to go back to the thing that felt like solid ground. But the floor was never solid. It was a person, which means it was always going to move.

Stop romanticizing your ex. Missing them, You're missing the version they showed you before you saw the full picture. You're not missing them, You're missing the future you're already planned in your head. You're not missing them, you're missing feeling chosen. You're not missing them. You're just not ready to let go of the story yet. But you will be. If you've gone through a breakup. The work, the real work,

is not to find new ground to stand on. It's to find yourself standing without anything to lean on in the groundlessness for long enough to realize you were always capable of standing alone. There's a Japanese concept called mono no aware, often translated as the pathos of things, the bitter sweetness of impermanence, the particular beauty and sadness that comes from knowing that nothing lasts. The Japanese don't treat impermanence as a problem. They treat it as the very

thing that gives experience its beauty. Cherry blossoms are the most revered symbol in Japanese culture, not despite the fact that they fall in a week, because of it. What you had was real, what you had could have been beautiful in parts, and it is gone. And all three of those things are true simultaneously, and sitting with that truth, all of it without rewriting the ending, without fantasy editing it into something it wasn't, without bargaining with the past

or that person. Is not resignation, is not giving up. It is the most courageous thing you can do, the willingness to feel the full beauty of something that is over. Now, let me tell you how to actually do that, How to interrupt the spiral, how to work with your brain instead of being controlled by it. Because knowing the science doesn't make it stop hurting, but it does change what you do with the hurt. Let me be really honest with you about breakups. There is no version of getting

over someone that doesn't involve feeling it. There's no cognitive hack that bypasses grief. There is no framework that makes this painless. There are two types of pain. The first is the pain that moves you, that transforms you, that carries you somewhere new. And then there's the pain that loops, the pain that keeps you exactly where you are, circling the same drain for months or years, pretending to be the depth of feeling when it's actually just a broken record.

Here's how you get to the pain that moves you. Tool number one, the no contact rule, and I want to talk to you about why it's actually biology. You've heard about no contact, but you may not know the real reason it works. And the real reason is not about playing games or winning the breakup or making them miss you. The real reason is neurological. Every time you check their social media, you are feeding the addiction. You are reactivating the dopamine circuit. You're telling your neural pathways

this is still relevant. Keep tracking it. Your brain cannot begin to withdraw, cannot begin to heal while you keep administering microdoses of the drug. No contact is not punishment. No contact is detox. And it includes the things you're pretending don't count. The casual social media check that you tell yourself is harmless, the friendly text you're composing in your head, the driving past where they live. Every one of these is a hit. Every one of these restarts

the clock on withdrawal. You're not cutting them off because you're cold. You're cutting off the supply because you're trying to heal. Those are complete different things. Stop checking their feed. They're not coming back because you watch their story. They're

not coming back because you like something from forty seven weeks ago at two am. They're not coming back because you figured out who that person in their photo is. They're not coming back because you've refreshed their profile eleven times today. They're not coming back, but your pieces the second you stop looking. Tune number two, the full picture exercise. I want you to do something tonight, if you're brave enough. Take a piece of paper, Draw a line down the middle.

On the left side, write down the things you genuinely miss, the real things, not the imagined, perfect version, the actual things that were good and real and valuable. On the right side, write down the things you've been selectively forgetting, The pattern that kept repeating, the way you felt bad on days which were more frequent than your highlight reel admits the specific moments where you felt unseen or dismissed, or too much not enough, the days you cried. Write

down who you were on your worst days in that relationship, right down the cost personally, professionally, to your family. This isn't bitterness, it's not revenge. It's accuracy. You're correcting your memories, editing. You're forcing your brain to hold the full picture rather

than just the trailer. Two Number three interrupt the spiral, literally, the romanticizing spiral, is a thought pattern, and thought patterns are neurological pathways, neural circuits that have been strengthened through repetition. Every time you indulge the spiral, you strengthen the pathway. Every time you interrupt it, you begin to weaken it. It's not suppression forcing yourself to not think about something. Actually, this increases the frequency of the thought. It's that don't

think about a pink elephant problem. The harder you try not to think about the pink elephant, you think about the pink elephant. What works instead is what neuroscientists call pattern interruption, a brief but genuine redirect of neural attention

to something that requires full cognitive engagement. When the spiral starts, when you catch your hand moving toward their instagram, when the imaginary conversation begins, when the maybe we gave up too soon story starts playing, you do something that requires your genuine attention immediately. Something physical works best, a short, vigorous walk, cold water on your face, five pushups, something

that activates your body and breaks the cognitive loop. Then, and this is key, you do not fight the feeling you name it. I am experiencing a craving for this person. Just that The simple act of naming an emotion, when

neuroscientists call affect labeling, activates the prefront or cortex and measurably reduces activity in the amygdala. You move the feeling from the reactive part of your brain to the observing part. You become the person watching the spiral rather than the person inside it. Pol Number four red build identity, not find yourself. I know find yourself is tired. Advice. Bear

with me because this is different, I promise. One of the most underappreciated effects of a significant relationship ending is what psychologists call self concept contraction. In a long or deep relationship, your identity expands. You become someone who is part of a wei. You have shared friends, shared routine, shared references, shared futures. When the relationship ends, that whole

dimension of identity collapses. You don't just lose the person, you lose the version of yourself that existed in relation to them. The antidote is not to immediately seek a new relationship to fill the gap, but to actively rebuild your own independent self concept to recover your own narrative. This means what did you stop doing when you were in that relationship? What did you let atrophy? What parts of yourself did you set aside to make room for

the wei friend? You let drift interest, You abandoned ambitions. You quietly shelved the parts of you that existed before them and are still there waiting go find them. Not as therapy, not as distraction, as recovery of self. Every time you do something that is purely authentically yours, something that reflects who you are, independent of any relationship, you are rebuilding the self concept that the relationship and the

breakup have eroded. You are answering the question who am I without them, and discovering that the answer is more than you remembered. Please stop making excuses for them in your mind. Don't forget how small they made you feel. Don't forget they had every chance to choose you. Don't forget the excuses you made for them. Don't forget you cried because of this person more than once. Don't forget how many times they disappointed you and you stayed anyway.

Please don't forget your worth. Please don't forget you deserved more than what they gave you. Please don't forget you

always gave them the benefit of the doubt. Please don't forget you always saw the good in them and receive the bad. Please don't forget you bent over backwards when they barely moved. Please don't forget. Someone who deserves you won't make you question if you're enough. Turne number five. Let the grief be grief. Don't dress it up as love. This is the hardest one and the most important. Grief

is grief. It needs to be felt, not managed, not optimized, not rushed through or bypassed or processed into insight before it's ready. Grief is a biological process, the nervous system integrating a loss, and it takes the time it takes. But there is a crucial difference between grief and romanticization. Grief moves comes in waves, intense and quiet, then intense again, gradually spacing out. It doesn't ask you to do anything

except feel it. It doesn't require you to figure out whether they were the one, or whether you made a mistake, or whether you should text them. It just hurts, and then hurts less, and then hurts again, and eventually, if you don't keep feeding it, it hurts differently, not as a wound, but as a scar, as evidence of something real that changed you that you remember. Romanticizing a relationship doesn't help you move forward. It loops. It keeps you

in a story. It asks you to stay in the question what if, maybe perhaps if, only because the story needs you to stay in it, to stay alive. The story is not serving your grief, it's serving itself. So let yourself grief actually grief. Feel the loss, feel the sadness, feel the particular ache of missing someone who is genuinely important to you. That grief is true, grit, if is healthy, That grief is the right response to loss. Just don't let the grief become a story that keeps you from

moving through it. Feel it, and then let it move. You've been telling yourself that you're holding onto them because of how much you love them. I want to offer you a different possibility. You've been holding onto the story of them because it's safer than the thing on the

other side of letting go. On the other side of letting go is the open question of what comes next, the terrifying freedom of not being defined by this grief, the vulnerability of being available to yourself, to life, to whoever might come next without the protection of still being someone's ex. On the other side of letting go is the work of figuring out who you actually are, not in relation to them, not in comparison to what you had.

Just you standing in your own life, making choices from your own center, building something from where you actually are rather than from where you wish you still were. But here's what I know. The love that is coming for you, the life that is waiting for you, is not located in the past. It is not in the photos you keep looking back to, or the songs you keep listening to,

or the imaginary conversations where they finally understand. It is in front of you, in the version of yourself that has been through something real and survived it and learned things you couldn't have learned any other way. I really hope that this episode helps you. I hope you'll pass it on to a friend who may be going through this right now. Thank you for trusting me. Remember I'm always in your corner and I'm forever rooting for you.

If you love this episode, you're going to love my conversation with Matthew Hussey on how to get over your ex and find true love in your relationships. Make a list of the things that are truly important for you to find in a partner, and then be that list