The anguish of missing your ex gf every second. What are you supposed to do when you just can’t stop thinking about your ex-girlfriend, practically non-stop. Making it impossible to move on, to feel better, to perform better at work, and not feel awkward and like shit around your friends, etc? Let’s talk about it.

Hey guys, welcome back to the Breakup Corner, I’m Andi Galster, and here I teach men how to move on from their ex-girlfriend. Thinking about an ex girlfriend non-stop, without pause, as if someone transplanted a permanent memory of her into your brain is one of the most agonizing experiences of a breakup! And depending on how significant the breakup is, or whether or not this is the first time that you have a breakup after a very serious relationship, the more likely it is that you just can’t stop thinking about her.

Is that what you’re going through right now? It’s like you’re not getting any ex-free minute. When you wake up, you start thinking about her very quickly, when you go to work, or maybe school, you have her on your mind. Even if you go to something like a party or meet a friend of yours, you’re always thinking about her? Man, it’s the worst feeling in the world when you just can’t stop missing your ex-girlfriend. 

The worst part about the whole experience is that you can’t ever feel normal, isn’t it? I remember this feeling quite well myself about the first, and well, only extremely heartbreaking breakup I’ve ever had… It’s the most degrading, embarrassing and depressing feeling when you are out and about and you’re unable to enjoy yourself because all you can think about is your ex-girlfriend, and no matter what’s going on around you, you can’t find anything to enjoy. 

This is the harsh reality of a really bad breakup. No matter what’s going on, even if you are technically supposed to be having a lot of fun right now, you just can’t enjoy the moment. And that is the crucial problem to talk about. I’m sure you’ve heard of popular books such as “The Power of Now,”, which advocates for the practice of living in the current moment, not worrying about the past or the future. But this is easier said than done when you had a breakup, especially as a man.

When a woman has had a breakup, quite frankly, her quality of life generally will increase because a woman gets attention from men non-stop, and when they are single, they also get to be more social with their besties. As such, their perceived value as well as their actual value rises quite substantially. Being single after a breakup isn’t too bad for a woman. As soon as she’s available on the market, she will gain a lot of attention from men, and she can choose every single day whether or not she will reciprocate the attention.

As a man, things are different. Your value, once you are no longer in a relationship, is derived not from your relationship with other people, but rather, you derive your value from your own competency, your skills, the things you can get done all on your own. And this is why the breakup hurts you so much more in the long-run, because while you are constantly thinking about your ex-girlfriend, you are not getting anything done.

You are essentially in the most inefficient, most distracted state that you’ll be in, within the next few years. As such, when you’re thinking about your ex-girlfriend, not only does it drive you insane that you have to think about her all the time, but at the same time, subconsciously, your brain is wired to instinctively know that you’re not doing great in life. You’re not being productive to work on a business. You’re not being high energy to prepare yourself for a marathon and achieve greatness in a 21k. You’re not the guy who’s organizing some kind of meetup or a small community. 

This is the real reason why missing your ex-girlfriend is so difficult. It’s not the fact that you miss her like crazy and think about her all the time, it’s that you know subconsciously that you SHOULDN’T be thinking about her all the time, and instead, you should get back up on your feet and start reinventing yourself, work hard on showing your skills and competence. You know you should prove to yourself that you’re still attractive and worthy of the love of a woman.

And every minute that you think about her, you know that the gap between you and her is growing. She’s moving on further, her life is getting better, she’s slowly regaining her happiness, and at the same time, you’re still stuck in the same place. And the honest truth is that there’s only one solution to overthinking about your ex-girlfriend:

You have to get moving and force yourself, every single day, to do new things, find new things to become competent in, and become laser-focused on yourself. A lot of guys make the mistake after a breakup that they try to be more outgoing and focus heavily on their social network, and well, actually that is not a bad strategy, but you have to socialize while at the same time leveraging your skills and learning to become more confident, skilled, effective and hard-working.

Men derive self-esteem from the fact that others see you as a highly-functioning, self-sustained man. The moment that you don’t feel that you are that man, you will ruminate about your ex-girlfriend and think about getting back together with her and you’ll think about all the good moments. Because you know that she was the woman who accepted you for the way that you were. 

And now that you’re struggling in life, and you’re all alone, without her, you’re on your own again, nobody to support you, and you have to prove yourself again in life. You don’t get the benefit of being a woman. In order to prove yourself again and be loved by a woman, you have to do hard work. Your ex, quite frankly, doesn’t have to do anything like this. Some random guy will come along, think she’s beautiful, and immediately want to date her.

And so to you, getting back on your feet takes effort. And that effort is twice as hard while you miss her like crazy. This is why you cannot stop thinking about her. You just want to get back to that space of comfort, where you know that you don’t have to work hard. But, the truth is, you can’t get your ex-girlfriend back. You cannot get back to that state of comfort. I know it is the most awful feeling in the world, but if you want to feel good again, and if you want to move on from your ex-girlfriend, then you have to make your post-breakup experience about yourself, not your ex. 

I know, that sounds like the obvious thing to say, but it’s easy to focus too much on your ex-girlfriend by looking at how she is coping with the breakup, or by looking back to the past to focus on how good things were in the past. But if you want to stop thinking about her, then you have to focus on how good things could be for you in the future. You have to set goals for what you want to achieve, learn, experience, and so on.

Women always do this, ironically, even though they should be the ones who should be less pro-active than men because male identity is far more focused on independent competence than it is for women, yet it’s generally women who do more of the recreational activities after breakups. As such, if you want to be able to move on from the breakup, you have to recreate yourself. 

I am not an advocate of being alone after a breakup. Socializing is important. But there is a lot of merit to the stereotypical “man cave”, as in, there is merit in being by yourself for a month and really honing in on how you want to live your new life, then creating a plan how you will get there, and then taking massive action steps towards achieving these plans. If you want to stop thinking about your ex-girlfriend, then you need to find something that actually gets you moving like crazy, so that all your focus will be directed towards the actions necessary to reach these goals. 

Only then will you be able to fully take your mind off your ex-girlfriend. So if you want the pain to stop and no longer miss your ex-girlfriend, then now is the time for you to spend a week in your man cave and take a pen and paper and craft a new masterplan for yourself. For example, coming up with a great plan on how to kick ass at the gym and become as attractive as you possibly could is a great idea. This is why getting jacked after a breakup is such a cliche. Men who really hone in on their desire to become strong, and prove their discipline, strive after breakups because they learned to focus on themselves, rather than their ex, and they spent every minute to pump themselves full of energy, conviction to fight, and get out of their dark place.

You can be that man who finds that one thing after a breakup that makes you forget everything. So now you can take the first step towards achieving peace, by sitting down with yourself and reflecting on how you want to redefine your life. It’s scary, it’s uncomfortable, but once you have drafted a good plan, you can start taking action, and soon enough, you will feel better and think about your ex-girlfriend less frequently. I know you can do it once you overcome the first hard steps.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for you this time.