Have you ever wondered why heartbreak hurts so much? Like, physically hurts? You’re lying there at 3 am, chest aching, unable to eat or sleep, and your body feels like it’s in actual danger. That’s because, to your nervous system, it is.
When someone asks me about how to get over a breakup, I always start with this truth. Your body doesn’t know the difference between emotional danger and physical danger. Throughout human evolution, being separated from our primary attachment figures meant a genuine threat to survival. We needed our people to stay alive.
So when that text comes through saying, “We need to talk”, or when they walk out the door for the last time, your ancient brain activates the same alarm systems our ancestors used when facing predators. Your heart races. Your stomach drops. Your whole system goes into survival mode.
This isn’t you being dramatic. This is millions of years of evolution keeping you alive. The problem is, in modern heartbreak, there’s no actual tiger to run from. Just an empty bed and a nervous system that doesn’t know what to do with all this activation.
Understanding this is the first step in learning how to self heal after a breakup. Because once you know what’s happening in your body, you can start working with it instead of against it.
Before we dive deeper into healing from heartbreak, we need to talk about your attachment system. This is the internal blueprint for relationships that you developed before you could even talk, written through thousands of tiny interactions with your first caregivers.
Think of it this way. As a baby, you learned fundamental lessons about love and safety. Is it safe to need someone? What happens when I cry for comfort? Will someone come? Will they come consistently? Am I worthy of being soothed when I’m scared?
These early experiences literally shaped your nervous system’s responses to relationships. And these patterns don’t just disappear when we grow up. They show up in full force during breakup recovery.
If you had “good enough” caregiving – consistent, responsive, attuned most of the time – you developed secure attachment. In heartbreak, you still hurt deeply. But you can reach out for support, feel the pain without losing yourself completely, and trust that you’ll eventually be okay. You have an internal sense that relationships can be repaired, or that new love is possible.
If love felt inconsistent growing up – sometimes available, sometimes not – you might have anxious attachment. Your breakup recovery probably involves obsessive thoughts, desperate attempts to reconnect, physical panic symptoms, and the terrifying belief that you literally cannot survive without them. Your attachment system is screaming “danger!” at maximum volume.
If caregivers were emotionally unavailable or you learned self-reliance was safer than depending on others, you might lean avoidant. You’re the friend who seems “fine” after a breakup, throwing yourself into work, minimising the relationship’s importance. But underneath, there’s often deep grief you’ve learned to disconnect from.
If early relationships were chaotic or frightening, you might experience both anxious and avoidant responses, sometimes within the same hour. Desperate reaching followed by angry withdrawal. Wanting closeness but terrified of it. This pattern makes healing from heartbreak feel impossible because you can’t find stable ground.
Knowing your attachment style is about understanding why you respond to heartbreak the way you do, so you can work with your patterns instead of feeling controlled by them.
Now, let’s talk about what’s actually happening in your body when you’re figuring out how to get over a breakup. Dr. Stephen Porges discovered that our nervous system has three main states, and heartbreak can send us careening through all of them.
Remember when you were happy in the relationship? Those moments of laughing together, feeling calm and content, being able to think clearly and creatively? That’s ventral vagal. It’s your social engagement system, and it only comes online when you feel genuinely safe.
This state is regulated by the newer part of your vagus nerve. When you’re here, you can connect, play, rest, and digest. Your body knows it’s safe enough to let its guard down.
The moment the breakup happens, most people slam straight into sympathetic activation. This is your body’s mobilisation response, preparing you to fight danger or run from it. During breakup recovery, this looks like:
If you have anxious attachment, you might get stuck here for weeks or months, texting your ex at 2am, driving past their house, unable to accept that it’s really over.
When fight or flight doesn’t work – when you can’t get them back, can’t fix it, can’t outrun the pain – your system might drop into dorsal vagal shutdown. This is your body’s last resort, playing dead when escape seems impossible.
In heartbreak, dorsal shutdown looks like:
If you lean avoidant, this might be your go-to state. It protects you from feeling the full weight of the loss, but it also keeps you from processing and healing.
The real challenge of learning how to self heal after a breakup is that we rarely stay in one state. You might wake up in panic (sympathetic), crash into numbness by lunch (dorsal), feel okay talking to a friend (ventral), then spike back into anxiety when you see their car.
This rollercoaster is exhausting, but it’s not a sign you’re broken. It’s your nervous system trying desperately to find safety.
Dr. Dan Siegel gave us a brilliant framework for understanding why does heartbreak hurt so much and why we feel so unlike ourselves during breakup recovery. He called it the Window of Tolerance.
Imagine a window. When you’re inside it, you can handle life. You feel emotions without drowning, think clearly even when upset, make good decisions, connect with others, and take care of yourself. This is your optimal zone of arousal – not too activated, not too shut down.
But heartbreak shrinks this window dramatically. Suddenly, things that normally wouldn’t phase you send you into total dysregulation. You find yourself in one of two zones:
When you’re pushed above your window, everything is too much:
This is where those 3am texts happen. Where you do things that seem completely reasonable in the moment but make you cringe later.
When you drop below your window, everything shuts down:
This is where you stare at the wall for hours, where friends worry because you’re “not yourself,” where you can’t even cry anymore.
The tragedy of healing from heartbreak is that the things that would help – feeling your feelings, reaching out for support, gentle self-care – all require you to be somewhat in your window. But the heartbreak itself keeps pushing you out of it.
Here’s where it all comes together. Your attachment system, nervous system states, and window of tolerance don’t work in isolation. They create a pretty complex combination of emotions that can feel overwhelming when you’re learning how to get over a breakup.
Let me paint you a picture of how this might look:
Your partner leaves. Your attachment system immediately sounds every alarm – “We’re not safe! We’re alone! We need them back!” This triggers massive sympathetic activation. Your heart races, you can’t eat, you’re flooded with cortisol and adrenaline.
This intensity pushes you way above your window of tolerance into hyperarousal. You’re flooded with emotions, can’t think straight, make desperate decisions like showing up at their work or sending dozens of texts.
The shame and exhaustion from being so activated might then crash you into dorsal shutdown – now you’re numb, hopeless, can’t move.
But that numbness terrifies your anxious attachment system even more. “Why can’t we feel anything? Are we broken? We need to feel connected!” So you spike back up into panic, starting the cycle all over again.
The breakup happens. Your attachment system says “We don’t need them anyway. We’re fine alone. Feelings are dangerous.” You might skip the sympathetic activation entirely and drop straight into dorsal shutdown.
This puts you below your window in hyperarousal. You’re disconnected, robotic, telling everyone you’re fine while feeling absolutely nothing. But the grief is still there, unprocessed. Eventually, it breaks through – maybe you hear their song or smell their perfume – and suddenly, you’re flooded with pain.
This unexpected emotion feels so threatening to your avoidant system that you slam back into shutdown even harder. “See? This is why we don’t feel things. Never again.”
You’re getting all of it at once. Your system can’t decide if closeness or distance is more dangerous, so you’re constantly flipping between states. Reach out desperately, then panic and withdraw. Need them, hate them, love them, run from them. Your window of tolerance is so narrow that everything dysregulates you.
Understanding this is crucial for breakup recovery because it helps you see you’re not going crazy. Your systems are doing exactly what they learned to do to survive. The problem is that what helped you survive as a child might be making it harder to heal as an adult.
Now for the practical part of healing from heartbreak. While understanding the theory helps, real change happens in your body. Here are gentle, somatic tools organised by which state you’re in:
Remember, these are practices. The more you use them, the more your nervous system learns “oh, we can handle big feelings and come back to calm.” Each time you successfully regulate, you’re literally building new neural pathways.
Here’s the hope I want to leave you with about how to self heal after a breakup. Your attachment style isn’t your destiny. Through something called “earned secure attachment,” you can literally rewire your relationship patterns.
But let me be clear about what earned secure attachment actually means, because it’s not what most people think. It’s not about becoming perfectly healed or never being triggered again. It’s not about becoming someone who doesn’t need anyone or someone who never feels anxious in relationships.
Earned secure attachment is about developing what the research calls “coherent narrative” about your experiences. It means you can tell your story without being overwhelmed by it. You understand how your past shaped you without being controlled by it. You can see your patterns clearly and choose differently.
People with earned secure attachment have usually done deep work to understand their wounds. They’ve spent time in therapy, in healing relationships, or in practices that help them make sense of their experiences.
They’ve learned that their anxious clinging or avoidant distancing made perfect sense given what they lived through. And from that compassionate understanding, they’ve built new ways of being.
What earned secure attachment looks like in practice:
What does this look like in daily breakup recovery?
Morning: You wake up, notice the heavy feeling (grief is here), but don’t let it determine your whole day. You do your breathing practice, text a friend good morning, eat breakfast even though you’re not hungry. When the tears come, you let them, knowing they’re part of healing.
Midday: Anxiety spikes when you see something that reminds you of them. Instead of spiralling, you notice it (“hello sympathetic activation”), do your cold water reset, then get back to your day. You might even get curious – “Interesting, that memory still activates me. My body is still protecting me from that pain.”
Evening: Loneliness hits hard. Instead of numbing with wine or scrolling their social media, you call a friend, take a hot bath, journal about what you’re feeling. You’re building new neural pathways for handling difficult emotions. You remind yourself that loneliness is just your attachment system looking for connection, and you can give that to yourself.
Night: Can’t sleep, thoughts racing. You don’t panic about not sleeping. Extended exhale breathing, maybe some gentle humming, reminding yourself that rest is enough even if sleep doesn’t come. You might even talk to yourself like you would a dear friend – “Of course you can’t sleep, love. Your nervous system is still on high alert. Let’s just rest together.”
This is about slowly teaching your nervous system new ways of being safe, connected, and resilient. It’s about becoming your own secure base while still being able to connect deeply with others.
As we wrap up this guide to understanding why does heartbreak hurt so much and how to navigate it, take a moment to reflect on what resonated for you:
Your Attachment Patterns:
Your Nervous System Tendencies:
Your Healing Resources:
Remember, healing from heartbreak isn’t about “getting over it” or “moving on” in some linear way. It’s about expanding your capacity to hold all of life – the joy and the sorrow, the connection and the solitude, the love and the loss.
If you’ve made it through this entire guide, you’ve already taken a huge step in learning how to get over a breakup. You’ve chosen understanding over confusion, compassion over self-criticism, and healing over staying stuck.
Your nervous system might still be dysregulated. Your attachment wounds might still be tender. Your window of tolerance might still feel narrow. But now you have a map. You understand what’s happening and why. You have tools to try. Most importantly, you know that what you’re experiencing is normal, changeable, and temporary.
The beauty of understanding these systems – attachment, nervous system, window of tolerance – is that it takes the mystery out of your suffering. You’re not crazy for checking their social media at 3am. Your anxious attachment system is desperately trying to maintain connection the only way it knows how. You’re not weak for feeling physically ill. Your nervous system is having a massive biological response to perceived danger.
And here’s what I really want you to hear. The very fact that you’re reading this, that you’re seeking understanding about why does heartbreak hurt so much, that you’re looking for ways to heal – this shows that part of you already knows you deserve better than this pain. That part of you, however small it might feel right now, is your wisdom. It’s the part that will guide you home to yourself.
Breakup recovery isn’t a destination you arrive at one day, fully healed and never triggered again. It’s a gradual expansion of your capacity to be with yourself and others in deeper, more authentic ways.
Every time you choose regulation over reaction, every time you reach for support instead of isolation, every time you stay present with your pain instead of abandoning yourself – you’re building earned secure attachment.
Some days will be harder than others. Some days you’ll use all your tools and still end up sobbing. That’s okay. That’s not failure. That’s feeling. And feeling, even when it hurts this much, is how we heal.
Trust the process. Trust your resilience. Trust that your nervous system knows how to heal when given the right conditions. You’re not broken. You’re human. And you’re already on your way home to yourself.
The journey of healing from heartbreak might be the hardest thing you ever do. It might also be the most transformative. Because in learning how to hold yourself through this loss, you’re learning how to truly show up for life. You’re building a nervous system that can handle big emotions.
You’re earning secure attachment through your own fierce commitment to healing. And that’s a gift that will serve you in every relationship to come.
Be gentle with yourself. Healing happens slowly, then suddenly. One day you’ll realise you went a whole hour without thinking of them. Then a whole morning. Then a whole day. And eventually, you’ll tell this story with wisdom instead of wounds, knowing that it led you home to yourself.
Remember, millions of people have walked this path of learning how to self heal after a breakup. They’ve felt this exact pain, asked these same questions, cried these same tears. And they’ve survived. Not just survived – they’ve gone on to love again, more deeply and wisely than before. You will too.
Your heartbreak is not the end of your story. It’s a chapter. A painful chapter, yes. But not the final one. Keep going. Keep breathing. Keep feeling. Keep healing. You’ve got this, even when it doesn’t feel like it. Especially when it doesn’t feel like it.
And on the days when you can’t believe that, when the pain feels too big and healing feels impossible, come back to this guide. Read it again. Try one tool. Just one. Take one breath. Send one text to a friend. Do one small thing to remind your nervous system that you’re not alone, you’re not in danger, and this will not last forever.
Because it won’t. This pain is temporary. But the strength you’re building, the wisdom you’re gaining, the earned secure attachment you’re developing – that’s yours to keep forever.
