The struggle of staying positive after a breakup if you’re a guy… Ah yes, breakups are not fair. As a guy, you have it so much harder than a woman to get back on your feet and to feel excitement in your life. As a woman, you don’t really have to do anything. Quit the opposite. After the breakup, you will instantly gain tons of attention from other men, likely also from many of your friends or secret admirers.

But as a guy, you start back at 0 and you have to work hard to become attractive again to other women. But the harder part is: Progress doesn’t happen in one straight line. You will have to maintain a lot of positive motivation for a long time until you feel happy again and until women want to be with you again. So, let’s talk about the struggle of remaining positive when you just want to give up, can’t get yourself to remain positive, and it’s almost as if you want to just let yourself drown in all your breakup pain because you’re feeling so paralyzed and tired of feeling so lost.

Hey guys, welcome back to the Breakup Corner, I’m Andi Galster, and here I talk about moving on from breakups for guys. So guys, if you have been following my advice for some time, you probably have noticed the one-and-only pattern that I keep on talking about over and over: If you want to get over a breakup, you have to get moving, work on yourself, recreate your identity as a man, and become even more masculine, assertive, confident, and ambitious than before. 

Breakups are great opportunities to massively level up and become a much more inspiring man than you were before the breakup. And I don’t think that has anything to do with “revenge” growth, or being held back by an ex-girlfriend. It’s just that immense pain makes us want to change, do better, and not repeat the same relationship mistakes again. So breakups can teach you a lot about persistence, grit, and perseverance in life. Ultimately, that’s the quality that’s required as a man to get an amazing girlfriend. So while breakups can be very painful for a man, they can also be one of the biggest opportunities of a lifetime. 

But, let’s not sugarcoat things: That doesn’t mean that breakups are easy. It’s possible to become 2 or even 3 times more attractive after a breakup and then date a woman that you find more attractive and has more traits that you prefer than was the case in the last relationship, but to get there, you will have a TON of ups and downs. And it’s the down-moments that you can really get stopped in your tracks, and this then makes you even more depressed than you already are.

There’s nothing worse than setting goals in life, and then failing and feeling like you are not good enough to achieve the goal. I think after a breakup, it’s important to dream big and set ambitious goals. You have to have a grand vision of how you want to become a more attractive man, and raising the bar for yourself to a height that seems almost unrealistic is the only way to do so. But it’s crucial to have an approach that can actually work.

When you struggle to stay positive after a breakup, or more precisely, when you struggle to maintain your new habits that are meant to bring you closer to your new ideal version of yourself, it’s likely that you are trying to rush everything too quickly.

In my book on attraction and finding a good girlfriend, I have a chapter that is called “You are already a winner”… The idea of the chapter is that success with anything, is generally speaking inevitable with enough time commitment, as long as you stay focused on your north star. You have to think with the end in mind. 

For example, many women are already attracted to you by default, and the outcome is already determined from the start, if your mindset is in the right place. The idea is, that if you don’t lose sight of what you want to get in life, and keep pushing towards that goal, it’ll happen eventually.

But instead, many guys try to do too much too fast after a breakup and when they don’t reach their goal, they could get demotivated. It’s really important to learn that maintaining positivity after a breakup is really like a habit. You cannot do thing X, and then you will magically feel better. I think when you want to stay positive and encourage yourself to improve your life, maybe even start dating again in the future, you should treat everything that you do like a small micro-habit.

For example, I have been doing Duolingo, and other types of language practice now for years. Almost every single day. And even my Spanish and Indonesian YouTube version of this channel could be considered language practice for me. 

Everything I do is a habit for my goal to become fluent in the languages that I want to become a master at. I never decided to set a specific goal of “I want to be fluent by year X“… Instead, I just decided that I want to be a language master, and instead of often feeling demotivated or even negative because I’m not where I’m at yet, I instead found small ways every single day to get a little bit closer to my goal. For a few months, or even 1-2 years, I guess, I completely dissected the Indonesian official dictionary and other resources to create my own English version of it.

It literally took me months of going through maybe 10 words per day… It was… Boring as heck and took forever. LOL But eventually, I achieved my desired outcome, because I didn’t try to set an unrealistic goal of “By May 2025, I will have created an English dictionary for the Indonesian language”

You should do the same about your goals and aspirations after a breakup. Of course, some goals may be relatively short-lived and can be achieved in just a month. For example, consciously walking outside in the city to practice eye contact with women can be done in barely a few weeks. Building up your confidence on a basic level can often happen in a brief boost.

But a lot of other habits, like hitting the gym, learning how to talk to women, and so on, is an ongoing process. And so it’s really important to not focus on your outcome. If you want to, for example, become very muscular, then you will be super disappointed if you only reach the goal in 1 ½ years versus your 9 month goal. And breakups in general already put you in a very weak and vulnerable position, where it is easy to lose your initial positive motivation if things don’t work out your way. So you need to set goals in ways that are realistic. They should make you feel better about yourself, not worse.

This isn’t just about breakups, but I think as a man, it’s best advised to have micro-habits that you can follow every day. Make your own bed in the morning. Do some basic cleanup once every few days. Maintain a good shave every 2nd day. Dress up without a slothful look, at least 5 times of the week. And so on. The things that you set your mind to have to be maintainable in such small increments that even if you forget to do one of them on a given day, getting back to your habit is just a matter of 5 minutes spent on the goal.

The harder it is to do something positive, the more likely it will be that you will start to feel depressed and give up on what you have set your mind to. And then, in the meantime, you’ll be looking at your ex-girlfriend who seems to be extremely happy, everything looks to be going great for her, and you’ll just want to throw in the towel because you’re not getting any results in life, and especially women, even though you have been trying hard to feel better about yourself after the breakup. It’s one of the most soul-crushing experiences to feel extremely unhappy with life, while everybody else seems to be winning in life. Especially when you see an ex-girlfriend being happy while you are not getting where you want to be. So you need to stay realistic and have smart habits, not hard habits.

The development of maintainable habits really is the best thing you can do to overcome a breakup, especially compared to the way how a woman has to go through a breakup. And, by the way, you can apply the same principle to truly positive experiences. Women tend to only focus on the easy, fun things after breakups. Dating. Shopping. Mingling with their girl friends. Partying.

While that approach is pretty bad, because it doesn’t produce results, it’s a good idea to at least follow the principle of building a habit of doing something on a regular basis that is fun and takes the edge off your breakup pain and loneliness. For me, as someone who lives next to the beach in Asia probably at least 70% of the year, I tend to try and take walks on the ocean shore. But even when that wasn’t possible, I would still go on walks. For example, in Yogyakarta, I would walk in the rice fields or just in the forest. Or I would try to go on a morning or evening run — even if I’d be busy, I would try to spend some time on something that is fun and makes me feel better. 

A breakup is essentially one big lesson in stress and time management. Of course, mindset management is also a part of that, but theoretically, even without doing mindset exercises, such as positive affirmations, breathing exercises, meditation, journaling, etc… It’s possible to remain very positive after a breakup, as long as you have a great system that keeps you going. And when you have the unavoidable day, or maybe even days or weeks when you feel bummed out, or it seems nothing’s working out, and you get hit with really bad luck, the good habit system has to be so easy to pick up again, that getting back to at the very least a baseline of positivity will be extremely quick and easy. So, set some positive goals for yourself, and then break them down into smaller baby steps. Identify how you can do the things you want to do after your breakup, but in smaller increments so that it is sustainable.

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