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

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast.

0:03Jay Shetty:Guaranteed Human. Lately, I've been trying to be more intentional, even with small decisions, like cooking at home instead of ordering out. It's simple, but it helps me save for things that truly matter. That's why I love the State Farm Personal Price Plan. It lets you bundle home and auto insurance to create an affordable price that fits your needs. It's one of those thoughtful choices that support the life you're trying to build. Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with the personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state.

0:43Jay Shetty:Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state.

0:54Jay Shetty:You ever show up late to the game and your friends already saved your seat, your drink, even a plate? That's looking out. That's having your back. And that's exactly what AT &T does with the AT &T guarantee. They know staying connected matters, so they actually guarantee a network that comes through when it counts. AT &T is connectivity you can depend on, or they'll proactively make it right. Just like that friend who takes care of things before you even ask. AT &T, connecting changes everything Terms and conditions apply Visit att.com forward slash guarantee for details There's nothing like escaping to a happy place And Celebrity Cruises helps you do just that From the Caribbean to Europe and Alaska You'll eat in restaurants known for good taste Enjoy all-day date nights And dive into the best pool days around Celebrity Cruises doesn't just build ships They build vacations you'll never forget Visit Celebrity.com, call 1-800-CELEBRITY or contact your travel advisor.

1:54Ships Registry, Malta and Ecuador.

1:57Jay Shetty:I know what you've been doing. You've been going back through the photos. Not all of them, just the good ones. The one from that trip. The one where they're laughing at something and the light is hitting them exactly right. You've looked at it more times than you would ever admit to anyone. You've been listening to songs that you 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.

2:28Jay Shetty:Maybe not their main feed, you're smarter than that. But their stories for sure. At 1am, 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, articulate, 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 than 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?

3:06Jay Shetty: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 3am ones, or the Tuesday afternoon ones when you're supposed to be working, you've been telling yourself a story. The 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 30 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.

3:56Jay Shetty:This is not a you'll be fine pep talk. 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. Not 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 your brain is telling you.

4:58Jay Shetty: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're not. 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.

5:42Jay Shetty:This was established definitively by the cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, one of the most important and most underappreciated scientists of the 20th century. Her research on memory distortion showed that human memory is extraordinarily malleable. We add details that weren't there. We remove 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.

6:24Jay Shetty: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 them most, the Sunday arguments that always circled the same drain, those get fuzzy, dimmed, explained away. You end up remembering a relationship that was approximately 40 % 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.

7:06Jay Shetty: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.

7:52Jay Shetty: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.

8:35Jay Shetty: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 Viktor Frankl. 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.

9:22Jay Shetty: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.

10:02Jay Shetty:Have you ever been to the theaters and you watch a trailer before the movie that you're going for and then you think, oh, 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.

10:36Jay Shetty: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 real and good, but because you cannot make clear-eyed 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.

11:15Jay Shetty: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?

11:52Jay Shetty:A pattern of your own that this relationship was surfacing? An 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 pattern 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.

12:32Jay Shetty: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 40 years studying couples, identified what he calls the full horseman of relationship failure. Contempt, criticism, defensiveness, and stonewalling. 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.

13:16Jay Shetty: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.

13:51Jay Shetty: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.

14:30Jay Shetty: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.

15:07Jay Shetty: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.

15:52Jay Shetty: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 avoid an 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 3am 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.

16:33Jay Shetty: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've spent their whole life running from. The terrifying evidence that they needed someone and then lost them. I'm not saying this to psychoanalyze you, but to offer something critical. Compassion for the scale of what you're actually carrying.

17:12Jay Shetty: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. As shocking as 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 has needed attention for a very long time.

17:55Jay Shetty:This breakup, as terrible as it feels, is also an invitation. The Zen teacher Pema Chodron 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.

18:48Jay Shetty:But the floor was never solid. It was a person, which means it was always going to move. Stop romanticizing your ex. You're not 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 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 always capable of standing alone.

19:38Jay Shetty:There's a Japanese concept called monono 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.

20:29Jay Shetty:it 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.

21:08Jay Shetty: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.

21:40Jay Shetty:I've been thinking a lot about how the spaces around us affect how we feel. And for the longest time, my outdoor space just wasn't somewhere I wanted to be. It kind of became this place I'd walked past instead of sitting in. The seating wasn't that comfortable, the setup felt a bit off and I kept saying I'd make it nicer, add some lighting, make it feel calmer, but I never actually did. And then I found Wayfair. What I liked was how easy it was to actually find things that fit the vibe I had in mind. I could filter everything, read real reviews and feel confident about what I was choosing instead of second guessing it.

22:11Jay Shetty:Now it's completely different. I actually look forward to being out there, having my morning tea, slowing down in the evening, catching up with friends. It finally feels like an extension of my space, not an afterthought. If you've been meaning to create a space that feels more like you, this is a really good place to start. Get prepped for the patio season for way less. Head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com. Wayfair. Every style, every home. Wayfair. Every style, every home. One thing I've been reflecting on lately is how even the smallest choices can create a big impact over time.

22:51Jay Shetty:Whether it's choosing to spend a quiet night in to recharge or making a decision that brings you closer to a long-term goal, those moments of intention really matter. And when it comes to the choices we make with our money, that same mindset applies. I've learned that saving for the things that truly matter, like your first home or a reliable car, starts with small, thoughtful decisions. That's why I appreciate what State Farm is doing with their personal price plan. It gives you the power to personalize your plan and create an affordable price that works for your life. You can bundle your home and auto insurance in a way that supports your journey and your goals.

23:31Jay Shetty:Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with the personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state, coverage options as selected by the customer, availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state.

24:17Jay Shetty:how powerful a single call can be. It doesn't take hours to make someone feel seen. It just takes picking up the phone. Those moments felt simple, but they stay with you. And you know, over all these years and phone calls, AT &T has been there, connecting people in meaningful ways. This is more than a story of technological innovation. It's a story of human connection. So today, call someone you care about. One conversation can mean everything. Connecting changes everything. AT &T.

24:56here's how you get to the pain that moves you tool number one the no contact rule and i want

25:03Jay Shetty: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 micro doses of the drug, no contact is not punishment, no contact is detox, and it includes the things you're pretending don't count.