Transcription
If there's anything we can all agree on, it's that breakups are brutal. Now, maybe you just got out of a relationship, and it's really fresh, and the pain you're feeling right now is brutal—10 out of 10. You might even be embarrassed to click on a video like this, like, "Am I that desperate? I need a YouTube video to help me." And hey, there's no shame in that. I think we've all been there at times, myself included.
Because let's face it, you've heard the advice: "Time heals all," "It'll get better," "Just hang in there." And you know, logically, that that's true, but emotionally you're like, "Dude, I'm still in pain. That's not helping right now." So in this video, I hope to give you a few unique perspectives and things you can do to accelerate your process, if you do want to truly let go and move on from someone you once loved.
Let's talk briefly about your mind and why it's sort of obsessing over someone in the first place. There's a cognitive bias that we all share as humans. This is what is known as the loss aversion fallacy—a big phrase, but summed up, it's very easy: You will work much harder not to lose something than you will to gain something. Put another way, losses stick in your mind and hurt more than wins feel good. An easy way to think about this is: If you were gambling, would you take a 50/50 coin toss and bet your whole life savings on it? Most of us would probably say no, because the pain of losing everything we have outweighs the pain of doubling it. Maybe you're someone who's competitive in sports; you know that when you lose, it's really hard to quit on that; you want to go again. But if you win, you're like, "All right, that's good; I can move on."
So you're not crazy if you find yourself a little fixated on this relationship, because think about the words we use to describe it: "They broke up with me," "I lost them," "It's over," "Heartbreak," "They dumped me," "They cheated on me"—all these like negative terms that essentially imply losing something: losing trust, losing commitment, losing the person. It's loss aversion cranked up to 11 because you're emotionally involved in this.
The second point, before I give you a few tips on things you can do now if you're really struggling to get over someone, you have to understand this: You can't just choose to get rid of the bad; you have to get rid of the good as well. Now, here's what I mean: When a relationship comes to an end, it's easy for you to wish that all the pain of this person and what you lost goes away, and that's what you want, right? But you have to understand that that's just one side of a coin, right? If this—right here, this lens cap—is a coin, on one side we have the pain that you're feeling right now. It's very real for you: "They broke up with me," "I lost them," "It hurts," "I want them back"—all these thoughts. But what's interesting is the other side of the coin: This is all the pleasure you're getting from continuing to think about this person. Like, how true is this? You're just sitting there; you're daydreaming about that person coming back into your life, breaking down the door and saying, "I was wrong; it should have been you all along." We literally have a whole movie genre that's centered around that—that people want that fantasy, and that that's so pleasurable to them. That dropping the story, dropping the thinking about their ex—so the person they can't get over—like, "Why can't I do it?" Because you're getting a lot of pleasure from it; you like it. You're like, "What do you mean I like it?" Well, if you don't like the story and the fantasy, you definitely like the possibility where the door is still there—that maybe it'll work out, maybe they'll come back. So what I'm saying is: Yes, to get rid of the pain, you can't just choose to drop one side of the coin; you have to drop both.
So those are some very big, high-level perspectives that really helped me; hopefully, they'll change your perspective. But what are some tactical things that you can do? Well, I'll give you a few that have really helped me when I was going through breakups and have helped clients that I've given these to as well. Step number one: If you were trying to reduce sugar, what advice would you give to yourself or someone? Well, you would tell them, "Dude, don't keep it in the house, first and foremost; stop buying it." You're nodding in your head like, "Yeah, that's obvious advice; duh." Well, if you are trying to get over someone, stop exposing yourself to the stimuli of them. Understand that your attachment to them is like any other addiction—to get kind of extreme here, like I want you to view it as an addiction—because you have so much dopamine associated with this person that, just like anything you can get hooked on, you can get hooked on a specific person. What are they doing? Who are they with? Are they still at that job? Are they still in this place? And now, with social media, it's really unique that you can pull up and, within, you know, 20 seconds, you see them right there. Or you have a phone, and you go back through, and you have all your memories; you might read all your text messages; you know, you see all the photos you took; you relive it; you reloop it in your mind. That's exposing yourself to the stimuli of them, and if you were trying to get over any other addiction, you would tell someone, "Cut all the stimuli out," wouldn't you?
Put another way, the first thing you should do, in my opinion—here, look, I'm going to tell you something that you do not want to hear, and it's going to be hard, but this works; this is the real deal—delete everything. Delete all your photos, delete all your messages, unfollow them, delete your conversations, so you can never expose yourself to the stimuli. Now, I know what you're thinking; you're like, "That is way too hard; that is way too fresh; I can't do it." And I would say you can. But if it feels too extreme or like brutal or like evil almost, what you definitely should do is download everything to a physical USB stick or a memory card, so it's not on the cloud, it's not on your phone, it's nowhere but this physical thing. You have to store that somewhere where you can't easily access it; it's putting barriers between you and that stimuli. So that's step one: Download everything to a physical USB or memory stick or a vault somewhere, and don't keep it on your phone; unfollow them; block them if you have to; stop exposing yourself to the stimuli.
The second step here: Remember how earlier we talked about loss aversion and how when you lose something, it sticks in your mind more than when you gain something? So there's also something called rosy retrospection. This is uh, when you look at the past—your past—we tend to overlook the negatives, and we see a lot of the peaks that were positive, and it's hard for us to have an objective view on it. This is why people get nostalgic over high school and they're like, "I miss it; those are the best times ever; I loved it." But they overlook all the boring, mundane times that they hated it. And so where I'm going with this is: You, right now, there's a good chance you're not objectively looking back on your relationship. So what I want you to do here—and again, this is not negative, this is not mean, this is not evil; push those judgments aside—is I want you to take out a piece of paper or a journal. I like doing it in a journal; you can use your phone or a computer, but you get more out of it if you're physically writing something down. And I want you to make a T-chart. Okay, on one side of the T-chart, you're going to write the things that you learned from them—the positives. What did you like about them that you hope that would be in a relationship in the future? "I like the way, you know, things were playful," or "I like the way that we handled XYZ," "I like the way that we were adventurous"—whatever it is. Now, you're not writing specific things about that person and getting in this mindset of like, "That's the only person who can deliver that for me." You're writing more like general things that you liked about you and them together, the dynamic that you had in that relationship. Okay, that's very important, cuz if you just fixate on specific things, you're going to get in that "one-itis" mode of like, "That's the one person; I'm never going to find anyone," and it's going to spiral. And if that's too hard to do, then do this other section on the T-chart. On that part, write down the things you did not like about that person. Think really hard about what drove you crazy about them, big or small. And I know that's—that sounds brutal, that sounds negative. When I was coaching a lot, I would ask clients who were struggling with something similar like this, like, "Okay, what didn't you like about them?" They'd be like, "Oh, I," you know, they'd have this resistance—"We're supposed to be nice"—but then you say, "Hey, push all the judgment aside; just tell me straight up, like, what didn't you like about them? Was there anything they did?" "Oh, they were super short-tempered; they were irritable; they wouldn't treat me the best; my mom said they were crazy." My point is that we overlook a lot, and so these little negatives help balance out when you just rosy retrospection—you have the rose-colored glasses on about this person, how perfect they were—you try to get objective and see the other side that is equally as important.
This one is the most important step for you; this is what our entire YouTube channel and really mission is centered on: I want you to use this as an opportunity to reinvent yourself. I've often said that breakups can be breakthroughs if you use them. When I look back on the times in my life that transformed me the most—like my biggest growth spurts—out of it, they always came after a huge transition: the loss of a job, breakups, moving places, losing something. It allows you to drop it and make room for what's bigger and what's better. And I'm so thankful that I went through some of those breakups that, even though during the time I said, "I do not want this; this is not what I want; this hurts," that evolution and progression—it needs pain, it needs a stimuli to grow; otherwise, it's not going to. And so maybe this breakup is your breakthrough if you use it. There's a cliché gym meme that floats out there that says, "Breakups make bodybuilders." It's true; you know, people use these breakups to channel it into this huge self-improvement journey. Often times in our Metamorphic program, we work with people who are going through that transition, and they need that guidance to like reinvent themselves. They're like, "Dude, you know, I'm in pain right now; I need something." And what I see happen in 6 to 10 weeks is amazing, because it's such an opportunity; it's such a prime time to reinvent yourself—is when you're going through a lot of pain, and you can tap in to wiping the slate clean and being whoever you want. Now, you're not reinventing yourself to prove to that person that you can get them back or that you're good enough for them; you're doing it for yourself. You want to prove to yourself that you can be all that you can be. Because here's the thing: Like, not only will you feel better about this, and it'll help the process, I fundamentally believe that it'll make any person you attract in the future better. Tens attract tens. This isn't just looks-wise; this is personality, energetically, vibe, charisma, lifestyle, what you believe in—like your 10-level person. When you start raising up, since you only attract what you are, not necessarily what you want.
The best advice—and I say it in every relationship video, cuz it's so important—is to stop. Stop trying to look for the right person; start becoming it. Stop trying to ask for things that we aren't ourselves. The only way your next one's going to be better is if you become better, and you do that by reinventing yourself. That's really what we specialize in in Metamorphic. I'll link down below where you can learn more and uh, potentially use your breakup as a breakthrough. If you made it to the end, can you thumbs up this video and drop a comment if any of these was useful? And the perfect follow-up to this video is our conversation: Let's continue it on detachment. Okay, how do you like detach from things so you don't have this obsessive energy on someone, something in your life? I'll link up right here where you can watch that. Thank you so much for watching; I'll see you in the next video. Stop settling; start living. See you.