I am all too familiar with heartbreak. In fact, the pain is still a fresh wound, having happened just over a month ago.

Heartbreak feels like the loneliest experience in the world, yet it is so incredibly universal.

“How do people get up and continue with life?” I have moaned for days on end, as I wallowed in the pain of losing the person I spent over three and a half years with. It’s an inexplicable sadness where your heart literally aches, filled with hour-long sobbing sessions, scrolling through old photos, and battling the intrusive thought that you’ll genuinely never find love again and that you will, in fact, die alone, so you better start liking cats.

While yes, I am still in the true pits of despair, I do have one thing that has helped me get over the hump of the initial grief, so I can finally function as a human again (a still pretty sad one, but functioning nonetheless).

It is, arguably, the hardest thing you will ever have to do in a breakup: going completely no contact, for 30 whole days.

We’ve all heard the advice before. But forcing yourself to actually remove them from your daily routine, and yes, that means putting all your cutie selfies together into a hidden folder, and hitting unfollow on Insta, and even removing them as a connection on LinkedIn so you have absolutely no visual triggers is essential for your sanity.

According to Mel Robbins, the reason a strict 30-day boundary is so important is entirely neurological.

And yes, I know that if you’re navigating a logistical separation like sorting out a lease or kids, total silence isn’t always possible right away. But if you can keep the communication strictly limited to those logistics, it is infinitely better than nothing.

When someone leaves, they don’t just exit your life; they leave behind a massive network of behavioural patterns deeply encoded into your brain and nervous system. Breaking up is fundamentally a process of unlearning. It is a literal physical, physiological, and neurological withdrawal.

I will be honest with you, it is so flipping hard.

There will be days early on when you simply do not have the bandwidth to get out of bed. The first few days are crippling, especially when you’re used to seeing their name pop up on your phone, and that initial week is absolute hell.

In those moments, you will feel like no one in the world has ever felt worse than you do right now, and you NEED to text them. But you have to stick it out for 30 days.

Any angry text messages, late-night paragraphs, or frantic urges to reach out need to be channelled elsewhere. Save them for your journal, draft them in your notes app, or send them to a trusted friend who will talk you down from hitting send.

Because I promise you this: breaking the silence might feel good for a fleeting, temporary moment, but the second the dopamine wears off, the anxiety will come rushing right back (I’ve been there!).

The thing is, once you finally get through the raw survival mode of heartbreak, that is when you begin to *heal.*

When a relationship ends, you have to let them leave. But letting go physically is only half the battle, and it’s where most people falter: they skip the crucial 30-day no-contact rule.

Think about it: the phantom sensation of them lying next to you in bed, the memory of their voice, or the automatic assumption of how they would respond to a joke in the car. Those aren’t signs you are meant to be together. They are simply standard, deeply ingrained neural pathways.

The real trap is that too many of us continue to follow our exes on social media, rewatch old videos, or replay old voice memos. Every time you do this, you actively fire up that old neural pattern, resetting the clock on your healing.

If you’re struggling to move on, you likely haven’t given yourself a true 30-day neurological cleanse. You need to remove the physical triggers.

You can even give your bedroom a minor makeover (rearrange the furniture or buy a new blanket) to disrupt the routine of a space where you spent so much time together. You don’t need to do anything dramatic like burning their belongings (or do you?) you just need to get them out of sight, so your nervous system can finally catch its breath.

Robbins notes that if you are still thinking about them 29 days later, it doesn’t mean you’re meant for each other.

“It just means your nervous system and your brain are trying to unlearn what life was like with that person. The more you look at this person’s life from afar, the more you are trapping yourself in a life you no longer have.

Any reminder keeps the old pattern active, which completely prevents you from moving on.”

According to Robbins, we need to completely shift how we view the pain of a split.

“We don’t talk about breakups the right way. It’s a literal physical withdrawal. You have to think about it like alcohol withdrawal, or like grieving someone who has passed away, because that part of your life is dead.”

And if you’re secretly holding out hope to rekindle your relationship, the advice still remains.

If you ever, even sneakily, want to get back with this person, you have to break it off entirely for 30 days. Get it out of sight, put the reminders away, and stop giving away your power. You have to find your baseline again so you can finally see with clear eyes.

I haven’t quite made it to the 30-day mark yet, but I am already starting to slowly move on.