What to do with a broken heart when you just can't take it anymore
September 15, 2008 | 23 CommentsFor my new book, “The Wisdom of a Broken Heart,” I’m compiling a list of things you could do when you think you’re about to lose it. Meant for those super acute moments when you basically can’t even remember your own name and you just need someone to give you a task.
It’s divided into three categories:
Distract it.
Indulge it.
Fight it.
What would you add?
Checklist: Thinks to Do When You’re About to Lose It
A semi-serious list of things you could do instead of drunk-dialing, head-shaving, burning things down, or devouring entire cakes at one sitting. I can personally attest to the viability of each of these items to take my mind off of what ails me. Even if it’s only for a few minutes. Refer to this list when you are desperate for something, anything to do to distract, indulge, or fight against your sorrow.
Distract it
• Dump every single item of clothing you own on the floor and divide into two piles: things that make you feel attractive and things that don’t. Take the latter pile to Goodwill.
• Organize your Netflix Queue
• Go to Amazon.com, Goodreads.com, or Shelfari.com and review all the relationship books you’ve ever read; begin dialogue with likeminded readers. Make your suggested reading list for others who are going through heartbreak.
• Organize your iPod playlists
• Identify 5-7 DVDs that do not make you cry. Could be funny movies or just absorbing ones. Keep this stack handy and when you feel yourself start to hyperventilate, pop one in the player.
My list:
40-Year Old Virgin
Anchorman
All About Eve
Flight of the Conchords (HBO; OK, this is the funniest thing I have EVER seen. You’ll even get a crush on them, which is great distraction from a broken heart.)
Intolerable Cruelty
Palm Beach Story
Weeds
The Wire (HBO; Any season)
The Women (original version)
Anything with Ricky Gervais
I queried friends and these were on their lists:
Big Lebowski
Bowfinger
Coming to America
Dodgeball
Love, Actually
Mulan
Office Space
Princess Bride
Raising Arizona
• Popular lore (now debunked) has it that Eskimos have countless names for snow, perhaps because snow is what they live in. Heartbroken folks live in a world of tears. Make up names for different kinds of crying. To get you started, here are a few kinds of crying that should have their own names:
Sobbing without tears
When you feel like crying, but you can’t—no tears come out
Crying that overtakes you out of the blue
Crying in your sleep
You don’t even know you’re crying, but you are
Talking and crying at the same time
• If you haven’t already, start following people on Twitter. I love Twitter. Someone coined a phrase to describe it: “ambient intimacy” and that is just right. Twitter is an online instant message service with the world. You find people and start “following” them. Millions of people are chatting with each other 24/7—but only in 140 character increments which is what Twitter limits you to, so no one can get overly verbose. It’s like a cocktail party that’s always going on and it enables you to get and give some human contact whenever you want. And disappear when you want. To get started, follow me: twitter.com/spiver.
Indulge it
• Identify 5-7 DVDs that do make you cry. I’m not talking about those dark, gloomy movies that just make you depressed—I’m talking about the ones that make you bawl like a baby. Sometimes it’s a comedy and sometimes it’s be Bambi. For example, the television show “What Not to Wear” always makes me cry even though it’s a fashion reality show. (Something about seeing the swan revealed at the end…) Keep this stack handy and when you just need to let it all out, pop one in the player and sob with dignity.
My list:
Dark Victory
Field of Dreams
Gladiator
Jacob’s Ladder
The Last Samurai
Stranger Than Fiction (when Will Ferrell sings “Whole Wide World)
Anything where a dog dies
I queried friends on Twitter and these were on their lists:
A Beautiful Mind
Bambi
Big Fish
Dead Poets Society
E.T.
Fiddler on the Roof
Grave of the Fireflies
The Green Mile
Hotel Rwanda
I Am Sam
Life is Beautiful
The Lion King
The Little Mermaid
Million Dollar Baby
The Notebook
Philadelphia
Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
Steel Magnolias
Sweet November
Titanic
Whale Rider
• Make a sob-sister playlist and listen to it. Here are my top 10 songs for when I want to get all worked up:
Change Gonna Come (Sam Cooke)
Dark End of the Street (James Carr)
I Can’t Stand the Rain (Ann Peebles)
I Can’t Stop Loving You (Freddy Fender)
I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (Otis Redding)
There is an End (The Greenhornes & Holly Golightly)
What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? (Jimmy Ruffin)
When I Get Like This (Five Royales)
Whole Wide World (Wreckless Eric)
Your Precious Love (Jerry Butler)
Fight it
• For god’s sake, go to the gym.
• Take on an exercise regime you think you can’t do: If you’re a yogini, try a 45-minute walk/run instead. If you’re a runner, go to a yoga class. If you always take Spinning, try strength training. If you don’t do anything, do anything.
• Walk. Walk. Walk. Drop everything and take a walk when you feel yourself about to collapse. You can walk in the morning or you can walk at night. (If you don’t live in a scary neighborhood.) You can take a break from your desk and walk around the block. You can walk in the summer and you can walk in the winter. There’s something incredibly cozy and fun about piling on coats, scarves, and hats and taking yourself for a walk when normal people would stay inside (when it’s raining or snowing, for example). You are not a normal person right now. Go with it.
• Help a stranger. This may be the most time-worn suggestion of all time, but who cares. The very second you help someone in need, something completely magical happens. All the energy that you had been devoting to propping yourself up turns from half-assed to raging, a force to be reckoned with—when it’s aimed at someone else. Self-hatred, depression, and insecurity disappear when you put yourself in the service of another. Everything you wish you could do for yourself—take your mind off of it, recover your dignity, feel good about yourself, become energized—just happens. You can help someone by:
Giving them money: do some research and donate to a charity. Go a little out of your comfort zone. If you could afford $10, give $15. If you could afford $500, give $750. And so on.
Volunteer: to read to people in the hospital, help out at an animal shelter, for a politician you admire (I think there may be one or two left), or at your church. One of the best tools I ever found for working with my depression was to volunteer at a crisis center. Talking to others in crisis balanced me out for some reason. The best kind is when you get right up in there with people (or animals) who are in actual pain, whether physical or emotional. Let their difficulty into your heart. You’ll know what to do
next. (And the volunteer agency will train you, too.)
Calling them: you can also help people you already know. Call a friend or family member who is going through some difficulty. Don’t talk about yourself. Keep the focus of the conversation on them.
categorized in: wisdom of a broken heart
23 Comments
i LOVE when Will Ferrell sings “Whole Wide World.” that song’s a classic no matter who sings it, and it was a total, overwhelming, surprising delight in that film.
um, the other things you said related to the actual content of your post are good too. 🙂
Ha! You cued right in on the best part.
“Total, overwhelming, surprising delight” is the PERFECT description of that song in that movie.
How about just sitting with it, observing the feelings, and letting them have their moment of voice?
Peace,
Bill
Accept It.
acute feelings of heartache overwhelm are not permanent. If you can stand to not numb-out or close down when the pain feels its worst, a sense of freedom and opening up to something bigger can emerge.
how to do: stay very present with the pain. let it be. don’t push it away, don’t grasp it, just be with it. no distracting, fighting or indulging it (though those all are excellent at times) and it might lift away, leaving you feeling free-er from the heavy weight of heartache and more open to something else.
just my experience. sorry for ramble.
Bill, agreed. But that’s what the whole rest of the book is about. Wanted to provide a list of options that could fill in the blanks when self-observation and allowing are simply not possible.
Sasha, yes to all you’re offering. Very helpful. But as I mentioned to William, how to do exactly what you suggest is what the rest of the book is about!
However, sometimes it’s simply not possible to just allow it. Sometimes your limbic system takes over and you simply cannot get enough space to be with it. In which case, here is a list of alternatives!
understood. in that case in the vein of indulgence (pre-fighting at the gym):
eat an entire Green & Blacks Organic Dark Chocolate Cherry bar, one delicious, indulgent square at a time and know that no heartache will ever separate you from the true love of chocolate.
Excellent advice!!!! But to be sure, I have to test it for myself…
awesome. i think i’m going to pop in 40 Yr. Old Virgin and throw away clothes.
Maggie. I just did. And my heart isn’t even broken. (Right now.)
Here’s a weird one, but hey, whatever works…
I spent one weekend listening – over and over again – to every single edition of Blue Collar Comedy I could get my frantic little hands on.
I was never a fan but on the drive home from work one Friday a snippet on the radio made me laugh so hard I cried a totally different kind of long forgotten tears.
Somewhere inside a voice said, ‘MORE! NOW!’ So I obeyed.
It was so cathartic (observations of the ridiculous, maybe?) that a couple of days later I noticed it didn’t feel like an elephant was sitting on my chest anymore.
And I can vouch for the chocolate remedy, though my girl was Godiva.
As someone who is currently “sitting in it” rather than the usual repress and deny, it is so helpful to hear various forms of coping when the whole feeling it gets a bit old. Sasha and Bill bring up good points of dealing with it, but that gets overwhelming and on the days where I just miss me, I rely on my distractions.
To add to the distraction list:
A Knight’s Tale
Anything by or with Kevin Smith
Tommy Boy–it doesn’t hurt here or here so much, but riiiiight here…
Remington Steele (proud owner of all five seasons)
And once the indulence needs to come into play I look to:
Shawshank Redemption
Regarding Henry
Gone with the Wind
Peanut M&M’s
And then I repeat a line from a Jennifer Aniston movie to myself…”Chin up young person.”
Excellent suggestions, Michelle! “Gone With the Wind”–of course.
As someone who’s been sitting with it for a few months, I can vouch for the value of these kind of suggestions. My own special thing during the summer (until last week) has been lying in the sun in the back yard — strange only because I’ve never been a lying-in-the-sun person, and because the urge to do so came on with a mystifying kind of urgency, as the ONLY thing that I felt some actual desire to do. I baked, I sank into some kind of lizard-brain state, I got lots of vitamin D. The cat sat nearby as my guardian angel and occasionally came over to lick my lead, like Aslan. Something changed for me, although I still don’t know what it was.
I have been searching everywhere for a list like this. Thank you so much. Honestly, this is the most helpful list I have found on how to distract yourself after a heartbreak.
So glad it’s helpful, Jeannie!
Thank you so much for this. Walked and walked tonight and then sat by the harbor and watched the boats for a long time. To everything there is a season: a time to be mindful and a time to distract. Thank you again.
What do u do when you been with a person for 6 years 24/7 I really mean 24/7 and then there gone soso sad heartbroken is not even the right word use
I’m so, so sorry to hear this. I know–there are no words. The only thing I can possibly say is, hard as it is to believe, you will not always feel this way… Wishing you well and sending strength…
Thank you, Susan
What happen when you actually don’t have the strength to do anything ? Like a heavy body feeling …
Mine’s a heartbreak but not from a break up per se
We’ve been doing long distance and I found out he’s been using pictures that are not his and when I confronted him about it he started acting all defensive and he has not replied to my last message and he’s not even online for almost 10 hours…I just feel so bad and I’ve been crying almost the whole night and I had this upcoming evebt to prepare for and I dont feel like doing anything at all…I dont think I’ll give my best during the preparation…I really dont know what to do