How to find peace after a breakup when everyone but you is happy? Hey guys, welcome back to my little Breakup Corner, I’m Andi Galster. Here I teach men how to move on from their ex-girlfriends. So, let’s talk about it. 

You must feel like shit right now… I can imagine that it’s driving you insane that your world is spinning in chaos while everyone else seems to have their life in order. Not only have I felt the same in the past, but I’ve been doing relationship coaching for about 5 years now. At this point, I can practically predict when someone is about to have a breakup. 

The next thing I can anticipate are the long posts about loving yourself, the enlightenment posts about how important life lessons are learned, about how to live the best life, about feeling confident or strong, the obligatory poetry post will be shared, and so on. It almost always follows the same pattern. Men and women may share slightly different stuff, but generally, it’s roughly the same principle. We want to show everybody that we’re doing OK. Even if almost nobody knows that we just had a breakup, we’ll go out of our way to post positive messages about ourselves.

As soon as our world falls apart, we try to make sense of it and we try to show everybody else that everything is fine. We got it all figured out and we’re not letting ourselves be pulled down by our breakup pain.

But of course, deep down inside, none of the shared posts about happiness, self-love, new-found wisdom, and so on reflect how it feels on the inside. If anything of this resonates with you, and maybe you’ve already done a bunch of these types of posts, then you know the truth:

You’re currently feeling like the only person on the planet who doesn’t have life figured out. Everybody is going on with their lives, for them they all seem happy and nothing’s wrong. But you’re the only outlier. You’re stuck with 1000 shattered pieces of a broken heart. No social media post about you doing fine is going to just magically put the pieces back together.

And that’s the point of this post. You don’t have to put up this persona about how life is going great. You’re probably doing a lot of comparing between how you feel, and how everyone else seems to feel. And I’d really like you to stop doing that, because that makes no sense. It may feel instinctively like it’s the right way to cope with your breakup, but it’s not.

First of all, you have no idea how your friends are doing. Many of them could be struggling with all kinds of problems, or they may be about to break up with their partner, and so on. What we post on social media usually isn’t the real version of ourselves. 

But more importantly, what you need right now isn’t to feel normal, or feel like you fit in with everybody else who seems to have a fairly normal life that’s in order. What you need is time that’s focused on yourself. And that’s not something that you’ll get by focusing on social media, what other people are doing, or how they may perceive you. 

What you do need is to find ways to reinvent yourself. And that’s essentially what people are trying to do when they post a lot of thoughts, emotions, new ideas, enlightenments, etc.. 

You should focus on the lessons learned from the breakup, and of course, focus on empowering yourself to feel happier again. But not only online to get a quick dopamine boost because someone liked your post, or gave you a heart/care reaction. You should try to find new ways to feel good in the real world. You are desperately trying to feel Okay or Normal again because your girlfriend used to be your dopamine that made you feel great. But now you’re on your own again. The dopamine has to come from somewhere else… And more importantly, that dopamine can’t be fleeting.

The best thing about an ex-girlfriend is that she gives us dopamine continuously, practically every day. She’s been a great source of happiness, renewed, day by day. I know it’s tough to replace that with something else, when most dopamine hits seem to be gone after just a few hours. 

But now, you have to find a new sustainable source of dopamine. You have to find new happiness in life, that’s derived from something else. You now have to reinvent yourself and find new things to enjoy on a daily basis to no longer feel lonely, sad, or depressed.

So if you really want to find peace, then there’s only one thing that you realistically can do: Go out into the real world, experience real happy things, and slowly but surely, you’ll feel better.

About a year ago, I had extremely bad mental health problems. It’s maybe a story for another time why, but the result of that was that I could barely go to a coffee shop because I felt like an extreme outlier. I knew that I wasn’t Okay, and I assumed everybody else was. Of course, that’s not 100% true. Many people secretly struggle, even if you are maybe really doing worse than others, they aren’t perfect either. 

But anyway, here’s what I had to do: I had to man up, go hit the gym, I had to teach myself to be happy again to sit in a coffee shop, to be okay to enjoy things that I used to enjoy doing. You cannot find your happiness after a breakup by posting about how happy you are. You have to create that happiness in the real world, even if it seems impossible to do so.

Is your life more chaotic than the average person’s life right now? Probably. Actually, most definitely considering that you went through a breakup. Man, I know it feels like hell, but it’s okay. You have the power to turn this around. Focus on yourself. Hit the gym, or go to some new kind of sport, try out a new hobby, attend something you’ve never done before, like a book club, and so on. 

These kinds of things probably won’t make you feel better overnight, but I think it’s the best thing that you can do right now if you are trying to find peace in a world where everyone seems to be at peace except for you. Get off of social media, or at least turn down the obsession of posting about how happy you feel, and instead, go back into the real world and try to find happiness there.

We post online about how great we’re doing because we want to fit in with our friends. But the only way to fit in with everybody else, is to… Well… Be more social, go out and meet new people, go out and meet up with your old friends. You’ll see very quickly that nobody will look at you differently because you aren’t at peace. They probably can’t even tell because honestly, most of the time, when we’re among other people, we tend to forget how bad we feel, exactly because we are feeling a boost of dopamine.

Yes, it’ll be fleeting and only in those moments, but that’s the right way to slowly feel at peace again. Get real dopamine hits, from real interactions in the real world, and I hope that in a few months from now, you’re going to feel at peace again. In time, you probably will discover something new that you really LOVE doing on a daily or weekly basis, and by that time, the pain of the breakup has faded at least to a degree, that life is bearable again, and maybe, it’s even quite fun again at times.

I know it’s a scary idea to try to find peace in an offline world, when you can’t even cope with the thoughts of others being happy on social media, but it’s the best thing you can do. 

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for you this time. So what’s your take on this? Share in the comments how you’re struggling with not feeling at peace, and what are some things you have thought about trying to relieve that pain? What’s something you’d like to try to feel happy again? What’s holding you back? Maybe talking about it will help a little. At least, I hope you found some inspiration for the next weeks or months to come.