Dealing with the grief and emotional heartache that comes from the end of a divorce or serious relationship is only part of the recovery process.
Beyond the grieving process, there are other important areas in your life that need some attention as you adjust to your new life status and start moving on with your life. Here are 12 simple tips for other key areas of your life for getting back on your feet after divorce or a serious breakup, so you can start the next chapter of your life.
Just remember life goes on, and you’re not alone.
1. Take Care of Number One
It’s hard to recover mentally and emotionally if you aren’t taking care of yourself.
Feed yourself good, nutritious food. Cooking for yourself is a great skill to have or learn, and great way to fill up time rather than thinking about your ex.
Don’t let your exercise regimen slip for too long, or if you don’t have one, find something you can enjoy doing. Even if it’s as simple as going outside for a walk: getting some fresh air and sunlight on your face has health, sleep, and mood benefits too.
Aerobic exercise stimulates the dopamine system, which helps boost our mood and helps us feel pleasure. Working out also releases pain- and stress-relieving endorphins, and elevates levels of calm-inducing serotonin.
2. Get used to spending time alone
After years or decades together, your identity and your whole world becomes the relationship. You become the husband or wife or partner, the father or mother. But after a breakup, especially after a divorce after a long marriage, it takes time to get used to being on your own again.
And when your heart is broken and you just want to lay around and do nothing.
Cooking for yourself, doing the laundry, grocery shopping, paying bills, walking the dog; get your routine down and learn to enjoy your alone time.
3. Date yourself
Reconnect with your interests and find some new ones to explore. Having a new project, something you can make progress with, will give you a sense of purpose.
Just do things that make you feel alive, make you feel happy.
Like recess. For adults who do #adulting.
Find some new recipes to try out in the kitchen. Work on that book or puzzle that’s been sitting on the shelf collecting dust. Learn a new language or musical instrument.
Bonus: All of this will also give you conversation fodder for when you’re back on your feet and start dating again! No one wants to date someone who sits at home watching TV every day. Except for maybe a fellow couch potato.
4. Focus energy on your career and your future
Post-breakup can be a great time to put some thought into your career. You’re going to need some distractions from thinking of your ex anyway. Think about taking classes or courses (or going back for a degree), studying for a new certification, taking on a big project, going for a promotion, or even looking for a new job or change of direction can be a fantastic positive area to devote more time and energy.
5. Lean on your support network
When you feel like you’re missing your ex (or missing the sex, or the cuddles, the companionship), you’re probably just feeling the loneliness of that void, that space your ex once occupied.
Fill the void and put the loneliness at bay by reaching out to friends and family. That way, won’t even have time to miss your ex.
6. Build yourself up
Going through a divorce or breakup can sometimes do a number on your self-esteem. There’s never a bad time to start taking care of your inner self and learning good self-care practices. And post-breakup it’s especially important to be vigilant to help your healing and recovery. See this post for more on self-love and self-care. And remember, things will get better.
7. Do a Relationship Inventory
This period is also the perfect time for introspection and to make improvements. Like changing the carpet and doing some remodeling after one tenant moves out of an apartment so you can rent it out again. You don’t want that moldy carpet or janky broken cabinets potentially spoiling your future relationships.
Take a look back at your last relationship or even your past few relationships and do some soul searching. Free and devoid of blame games.
Are there good or bad patterns? What parts were working, and what wasn’t working? Are there any changes you want to make for the future and how you approach dating, relationships, communication with your partners?
Part of healing and moving on includes accepting your own role in what happened. Be honest, but don’t beat yourself up. Learn from the past and use those lessons to be better in the future.
8. Knowledge is power
As you take a closer look at your past relationship(s), it’s also a great time to take a look at how love and relationships work in general. And learn how your brain, body, and heart process and feel attraction, lust, and love. Just like you take work personality tests and communication style classes to help build a better team at work, it can be very helpful to know how successful relationships “work” and how your own patterns and tendencies play a role in your relationship outcomes.
Do you know your own attachment style? The book Attached is a great resource to help recognize your own patterns and build healthier relationships through the science of attachment theory.
Do you know your dominant Love Languages? How you tend to express love and affection, and how you like to receive love and affection from someone else? Take the quiz here to find out what love languages resonate with you.
Peel back enough layers, and at the root of many externally-manifesting problems is shame. Shame leads to fear, doubt, insecurities, and more. It holds us back from living our lives and living up to our potential. Brené Brown’s best-selling Daring Greatly is a great resource to start uncovering what may be holding you back and finding the courage to be vulnerable and overcome our shame.
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
When you start to delve into understanding how love and relationships work, you can gain tools to navigate your own relationships more successfully, and make better and more healthy decisions.
9. Take a trip to outside your comfort zone
One of the best ways to distract yourself during post-breakup grieving is to travel. And if you really want to get out of your comfort zone and get to know yourself better, travel somewhere new you’ve never been before, and hop on that plane alone.
Doing new and exciting things stimulates the release of dopamine, helping restore physical and emotional energy.
There are still things you can do even though it’s not the easiest time to fly somewhere.
Head to the mountains for some camping, hiking, and some (inter)stellar stargazing. You haven’t seen the night sky till you’ve seen it hours away from city lights.
Plan a road trip or cross-country trek to experience some of the majestic national parks or coastal regions right here in our backyards.
The important part is getting out of the house and getting a literal change of scenery from your everyday routine.
10. Know your triggers, and find replacements
We attach fond memories to songs, restaurants, places, TV shows, anything that we used to enjoy together.
Give yourself time, find replacements for all the things that dig up those memories, and be compassionate with yourself. To your body, healing from heartache and loss is the same kind of process as recovering from a serious addiction.
11. Detox from your ex
Just like a bruise you keep bumping, seeing your ex pop up on your phone or checking their social feeds (and getting that dopamine fix) is torturing yourself and resetting the healing “timer” on your heart, no matter how good an idea “checking one more time” seems like in the withdrawal-fueled moment.
It’s basically a gateway drug to becoming a crazy ex, or at the very least driving yourself crazy. (Been there, done that….)
Hide or mute their social content, delete or block their account, delete their contact info. Whatever you have to do…just do it. Zero contact and exposure, if at all possible.
12. Reducing contact when split child custody is involved
If you and your ex have children together (or pets), cutting contact and moving on is tricky if not impossible. And that makes healing and moving on just that much harder. But there are things you can do to make it more manageable.
Set boundaries and keep communication related to just the children or whatever topic is necessary to discuss (ie., divorce logistics).
If you find that that texting creates a dynamic that is too informal, too immediate, or leads to emotional tangents or fights, shifting all communication over to email can also help keep things simple.
If things continue to get heated, you may need to learn to set boundaries or even block communications for a short period.
The children should come first, so keep their needs and what’s best for them as your top priority. If that means more or less communication, email correspondence instead of in-person conversation during drop-off and pick-up, a shared Google calendar for events and pick-up times, do whatever it takes to keep the co-parenting relationship open and cordial.
I recommend the book Helping Your Kids Cope with Divorce The Sandcastles Way to help navigate the divorce and figuring out a good co-parenting dynamic.
Additional resources
If you’re still dealing with a lot of grief from your split, I have another post on how to deal with the grief and pain.
Just know that you’re not alone. And that it gets better. If you take care of yourself, the process hopefully won’t be quite so painful.
If you are looking for more resources, I have found these to be excellent.
For help coping with a breakup, healing, getting your confidence back, and moving on:
Getting Past Your Breakup – Susan J. Elliott
For more intense breakups, learning to re-calibrate your “chemistry compass” and stop the cycle of bad/toxic relationships and destructive habits, or just to read a really great and science-backed book about breakups and healing your heart, check out:
Breakup Bootcamp: The Science of Rewiring Your Heart – Amy Chan
Whether you’re single or in a relationship, learn how to let go, and discover, nourish, and treasure the most important relationship of all – the one with yourself:
Single on Purpose: Redefine everything. Find yourself first. – John Kim
Learn more about attachment theory in this best-selling book:
Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help YouFind – and Keep – Love – Levine, Heller
Shame can be found at the root of a lot of perfectionism, insecurities, self-esteem issues, and more. Learn more about overcoming shame through vulnerability from this best-selling book:
Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead – Brené Brown
