Involuntary thoughts about an ex can be beyond exhausting. They can make you feel like your entire life revolves around your ex and that no matter how badly you want to get your life back in order and be happy, your happiness and well-being continue to depend on what your ex thinks, feels, and does.
Thinking about an ex is a serious obsession that requires a healthy strategy, time, and a lot of willpower to break. It requires you to want to stop thinking about your ex and do things that promote your independence.
If you constantly make breakup mistakes (reach out, stalk your ex online, and talk to people about your ex), you’ll struggle to detox from your ex. This is because you’ll feed your brain with unnecessary/new information, find things that shock and hurt you, and delay your recovery.
To stop thinking about your ex, you’ll often have to do what you want to do the least. You’ll have to resist the temptation to listen to your emotions and do the rational, self-respecting thing. This means you’ll have to ignore the need to feed your obsession with your ex and shift your focus away from your ex.
Fortunately, there are many things you can do to distract yourself. You might not want to distract yourself when obsessing over your ex feels more interesting and important, but you must nonetheless commit to trying your best. That’s how you’ll slowly break the pattern of obsessing over your ex and develop the strength and ability to not think about your ex all the time.
I say all the time because occasionally, you’ll still remember your ex. You’ll see things that remind you of your ex and make you feel how you felt in the past. That’s understandable since you created many memories with your ex. You experienced good and bad emotions and will never completely stop thinking about them.
But you will almost stop thinking about your ex and detach to the point where thoughts about your ex stop affecting you.
You’ll stop caring about your ex when you get enough emotional distance from your ex, gain control over your thoughts and emotions, and develop healthy methods for dealing with intrusive thoughts. Every person has a different coping mechanism and uses different techniques to stop thinking about the dumper.
Some people remind themselves their son or daughter needs them to stay focused and energized whereas others find a person, a hobby, or an activity to distract themselves with.
What works for others might not work for you. You’ll have to find your own motivator to avoid thinking about your ex. Especially when you feel sad, anxious, depressed, and desperate to reach out to your ex. When difficult emotions overwhelm you, you must refuse to give them power.
Instead of reacting to them, you must act on them.
Tell them you’re in control of your body and mind and that you have no choice but to stay away from your ex and keep busy. A good way to do that is to call a friend or a family member. Engaging in conversation with a familiar/caring person could help you open up about your problems or keep your thoughts away from your ex.
If the breakup just happened and you’re anxious, depressed, or suicidal, it would probably help to talk about your thoughts and feelings. Keeping them to yourself will make it harder for you to process them and leave them behind.
But if you’ve gotten over the initial shock and have the strength and desire to move forward with your life, then you’ll need to do everything in your power to avoid and stop thinking about your ex. You’ll have to realize that you’ve developed an unhealthy pattern of obsessing about your ex and that it will take some work to regain your focus.
I don’t know how long that will take, but don’t expect to do it overnight. Breakups are one of the most painful experiences people go through. Because they’re so painful, they cause people to develop low self-esteem, fears, trust issues, and obsessions that take months of active work to work through.
You could work through them even without doing anything special, but it would take you much longer and prevent you from growing stronger and wiser.
So if you want to know how to stop thinking about your ex, the first thing you need is a desire to break the obsession you’ve developed because of rejection and pain. You must understand you’ve put your ex on a pedestal due to a loss of self-esteem and the idea that your ex can give you what you want (a relationship) and save you from pain.
When you understand that you won’t or might not get the love and validation you seek, you’ll start thinking about other outcomes and ways to feel in control of your life. Other ways include friendships, ambitions, exercising, learning new things, hobbies, and doing anything that keeps your brain engaged.
If you do things that you enjoy and keep you busy, you’ll spend less time thinking about your ex and ways your ex could make you happy. You’ll learn that your ex occupies your mind mainly when you’re anxious, sad, and nostalgic and that there are ways to reduce the amount of time you think about your ex.
They’re called distractions.
At first, distractions may not seem very effective. You’ll think about your ex even when you’re with friends or at work. But when you keep your focus on other people and things for a while, you’ll slowly start to notice that you’re doing a little bit better every day. Improvement may be minor, but it’s an improvement nonetheless.
It’s a sign that you’re healing and getting your happy self back.
Don’t give up. I know it’s hard to distract yourself when you badly need your ex to take you back and validate you, but it’s not impossible. The worst is already over. You already got dumped and dealt with the consequences of the breakup. Now you must address your shortcomings, false hope, and intrusive thoughts.
Take it one step at a time and allow yourself to grieve and think about your ex when you really need to. But when you feel strong and in control, focus on detachment, self-improvement, distraction, and anything that helps you create an independent life of your ex. That’s how you’ll stop thinking about your ex and think about yourself more.
In this post, we shed some light on how to stop thinking about your ex when you were dumped.
How do I stop thinking about my ex?
If you want to stop thinking about your ex (which you should), you should understand that it’s okay to think about your ex. Intrusive ex-thoughts reveal that you have unprocessed thoughts, beliefs, opinions, pain, fears, or feelings to address. You’re not emotionally ready to let go of your ex because your brain still depends on your ex for reassurance, love, and happy hormones in general.
It hasn’t been able to wean off your ex and find a replacement for your ex yet.
That doesn’t mean things will stay that way forever, though. If you take back control of your life and invest in parts of your life that need investing, you’ll slowly but surely stop thinking about your ex and start living the kind of life you want to live.
I want you to know that you can and will give over your ex as long as you:
- believe in detachment and detoxification
- commit to doing what’s best for your health and happiness
You shouldn’t expect to stop obsessing over your ex in a matter of days on your own without doing/changing anything. Detachment doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t reward passiveness, stagnation, pessimism, and laziness. It rewards positive thinking and trial and error. The more you want and try to stop thinking about your ex, the sooner your wish will come true.
There’s no reason why it shouldn’t.
Only dumpees who live in denial and actively try to keep their ex in their lives stay hung up on their ex for years. Such dumpees value their ex and the lives they lost more than themselves and their future. They don’t see or care what their obsession with their ex is doing to them mentally and emotionally and that it’s wasting their precious time.
All they care about is impressing their ex and getting another chance with their ex. Little do they know that endeavors to “win” their ex back make them look weak, desperate, and needy for love, attention, and security.
So if you want to stop thinking about your ex, give up on winning your ex back directly with words and actions. Acknowledge that your ex has made up his or her mind and that you can’t change it on your terms. Your ex has to change it willingly by improving his or her perception of you and redeveloping romantic feelings.
If you convince yourself that you lack the power to change your ex’s opinion of you and the relationship, you’ll spend less time thinking about ways to reconcile and more time about ways to restore the relationship with yourself. You also won’t relive the breakup as often and won’t feel extremely tempted to act on nostalgia and pain.
Therefore, there’s more than one way to stop thinking about your ex. You’ll have to fulfill all your needs to feel satisfied without your ex. If you just focus on one particular aspect of your life (let’s say your friends), you may feel socially satisfied, but not in other ways.
You’ll feel incomplete as a person and suffer more because of it.
You have to know what goal you’re moving toward. Whether you’re working toward a degree, contributing to society (working or volunteering), or being a good parent, you must have a reason to exist. If you don’t, the breakup will take the one thing you love away from you, expose your over-investment in your ex, and cause you immense suffering.
It will show you it was a mistake to go all-in with your ex.
Hence, you should never put all your eggs in one basket. You must have multiple sources of happiness. This is the time for you to think about things that make you happy and make some healthy improvements.
I don’t know what’s lacking in your life, but everyone has things to work on. If you feel lonely more often than you’d like, expand your social circle with like-minded people. If you don’t have work or work that you enjoy, find a new job. And if you lack interesting things to do, find new hobbies and activities to keep you entertained.
Think about your lackings and shortcomings for a few minutes and write them down if you want to. When you discover them, you can make a plan on how to better yourself and your life.
This is the most important tip I can give you on how to stop thinking about your ex. When you’re working toward a pre-determined goal, you won’t have a reason to think about your ex and the life you could have with him or her. You’ll be satisfied with your own life and won’t need your ex to save you from pain and anxiety.
You’ll still need to get over the rejection, but it won’t be that challenging when you have a purpose and know your worth.
So get to work and identify and repair your flaws and direction in life. Make sure to know your worth because it will keep your self-esteem healthy and keep your obsession with your ex under control.
If you were in an abusive or power-imbalanced relationship, you’re expected to think about your ex all the time. You’re expected to remember the times you chased your ex and got or didn’t get the reassurance you craved.
Unhealthy relationships and breakups cause dumpees to obsess much more than healthy ones. This is because they hurt dumpees and make them stay dependent on their ex for healing and validation.
If you were in a bad relationship and want to stop thinking about your ex, you have to first process the bad times from the past (the power struggles, traumas, and fears). You have to disassociate stress and fear from those experiences and think of them as nothing more than bad experiences.
When you do that, you won’t need your ex to help you deal with the past and will be able to focus on the present moment.
So if you’re having difficulty not thinking about your ex, remember to focus on:
- Accepting the breakup.
- Forgiving yourself and your ex.
- Letting go of all the bad things that happened before, during, and after the breakup.
You must forget about the unmet cravings and needs from the past and find a way to feel fulfilled without your ex. You can do this by telling yourself that your ex couldn’t or didn’t want to give you the kind of love and stability you wanted and that you’ll soon find them without your ex.
It might not happen tomorrow, but eventually, you’ll feel happy with your own company and stop thinking about your ex.
With that said, here’s how to stop thinking about your ex.
What if I try all these things and nothing works?
Most people don’t even do half the things mentioned in this article. They want to get over their ex and move on with their life, but they don’t put in the effort. Instead of working on losing hope and getting over their ex, they focus on things that hurt them and make them even more obsessed with their ex.
Many times, they communicate with their ex or tolerate breadcrumbs and expect to magically stop thinking about their ex. This doesn’t happen. It can’t happen because they get hurt and keep analyzing their ex’s words and behavior.
To stop thinking about your ex, you must understand the dynamics of breakups and act as if your ex doesn’t exist. When you act that way long enough, your ex will lose significance in your eyes and get replaced by other (better) people and things.
Oftentimes, complete detachment is just a matter of time. Sooner than later, dumpees disconnect from their ex and fall back in love with themselves. They realize their ex doesn’t deserve them and that they should let go of their ex and have a new beginning. That’s when they finally start enjoying their life again.
A few months are probably not enough for you to get your ex out of your head. They’re barely enough to improve your self-esteem and some behavioral patterns. Try to remember that breakups are complex situations and that some people need longer than others. It depends mainly on their self-esteem and how they handle the rejection.
If they handle it poorly (reach out, beg for love, and watch their ex fall in love with someone else), they need much longer to process the breakup and stop thinking about their ex than people who follow the rules of no contact have no idea what their ex is doing.
Don’t give up on healing if you’re still thinking about your ex months after the breakup. It will take longer than that, especially if you were in a long-term or intense relationship. No matter how difficult it is and how long it takes, stay positive and focus on things that are working in your life. Focus on your friends and family and things that you’re grateful for.
You’ll get your ex out of your mind faster if you block out negativity and embrace positive thoughts and feelings.
Did you learn how to stop thinking about your ex? Do you have any tips to share? Post them in the comments below.
However, if you’re looking for tailored advice on how to stop thinking about your ex and get over him or her, get in touch with us directly. We’ll create a plan that decreases the amount of ex-thoughts going through your head and speeds up your healing.
My name is Zan and I’m the founder of Magnet of Success. I enjoy writing realistic relationship and breakup articles and helping readers heal and grow. With more than 5 years of experience in the self-improvement, relationship, and breakup sphere, my goal is to provide advice that fosters positivity and success and avoids preventable mistakes and pain. Buy me a coffee, learn more about me, or get in touch today.
