Suffering for love is part of that kind of experience that is hard to imagine when you start a relationship.

Falling in love can cause practically everything that happens to us in our daily lives to be perceived differently, since its emotional impact influences the way we perceive what happens to us. But this is true for better and for worse. The lack of love or frustration caused by relational problems in love also causes suffering that reaches almost all areas of our lives.

Thus, suffering for love is one of the most damaging types of psychological suffering , since, just as falling in love permeates almost all of our mental processes, the problems derived from it do too. What can we do to make this discomfort disappear or go away almost completely?

Tips for Overcoming Suffering for Love

The advice you’ll read below can be a very useful aid in times when the hopelessness and sadness that comes with falling out of love seem to fill everything. However, it must be clear that each case is different, and when applying these steps to your situation, you need to adapt them to the context in which you live.

Assume you will need time to improve

As in everything related to emotional problems , to stop suffering for love there are no easy and instantaneous solutions. This is because our nervous system, which is the basis of emotions, is not accustomed to sudden changes that leave sustained changes in the long term, unless it is due to injury.

Mental processes, including those responsible for emotion, occur through the interaction of millions of interconnected neurons, and to overcome suffering for love, it is essential that the necessary time elapses for some of these nerve cells to “learn” to interact with each other in another way.

Obviously, just knowing you’re going to need some time to recover won’t make you better. However, it will help to keep the problem from getting worse or worse, since someone who expects improvement in the morning can become so frustrated that he or she becomes obsessed with the subject. The fact that we feel emotionally “blocked” by the simple fact of not recovering instantly makes us think all the time about how to get rid of that emotional entanglement, and this in turn makes our attention increasingly focused on that discomfort : a vicious circle.

2. Assess your case to make sure you don’t have depression

It’s one thing to suffer for love and another to experience depression. The latter is a mental illness that can be very serious and, although it can be triggered by events that happen to us, its causes are to some extent independent of the love problems we may have.

It should be noted, however, that in the vast majority of cases where one suffers for love, depression is not behind it, so there is no reason for alarm at first. But if you think you’re suffering in an extreme way and in a constant and sustained way, you shouldn’t assume you have depression either; in that case the next step is to assist a mental health professional to make a psychological diagnosis.

3. Rest first

Between the first hours and the first few days after you start to suffer from love, if it is an “acute” case caused by a concrete event (a break-up, a disappointment in love, etc.) you may not have the strength to propose major changes, even those that have to do with feeling better. Therefore, it is good that you set yourself a margin of time to recover a little , physically and mentally.

To do this, it is good to set a time beforehand when the initial recovery stage is over and you start to take active steps to feel better. When that time comes, which can be three days, for example, you should assess whether progress has been made, even if the emotional suffering is still there.

It should be noted that this step is not mandatory, since in some cases the discomfort is not so intense as to require it, but it is advisable to follow it in order to have that symbolic reference that marks the beginning of the change.

4. Break the cycle

Once you have gone through the initial recovery stage, it is necessary to break the cycle of habits associated with discomfort .

To do so, he undertakes new routines and habits. Starting from scratch in something that is not mastered but that we can find stimulating and that fits our abilities allows us to train our attention span so that it becomes accustomed to, little by little, ceasing to focus on the cause of suffering for love.

Thus, habits such as drawing, walking in new areas, training in a new sport, learning a language… are positive because if we modify our actions and our contexts, our mental processes also change .

If one or more of the new habits is related to an idea of progress (such as when we intend to learn a language), it is necessary to have realistic expectations and assume that our vulnerable emotional state will probably cause us to progress more slowly than we would have done if we had always felt good.

5. Don’t forget to socialize

Relating to other people is positive because allows us to express in words what we feel and because, in addition, it facilitates our exposure to stimulating situations, capable of making new interests and concerns attract our attention and “detach” it from suffering.

6. Wears healthy habits

This step has three basic pillars: sleeping well, eating well, and getting moderate exercise. In this way, the state of the body will also make the nervous system predispose us to feel better and not fall into anxiety and discomfort, something that happens among other things when the body sends us signals that something is wrong.