How To Manage A Broken Heart

In the early stages, accept your pain. If you'd broken your leg, you'd expect it to hurt for a while and you'd manage your life around it. It's the same with emotional pain: to cope with heartbreak, let your heart be broken for a while. It will heal easier if you let nature take its course.

Realise that healing from emotional pain is a rollercoaster ride - not a straight line. Whereas a physical injury will get steadily better day by day, emotional hurt doesn't heal like that. You get a run of good days, then WHAM! A bad one hits. Expect these, and you'll discover you can cope with the heartbreak much better.

Don't add guilt to anger. If you've been dumped or abandoned, it's quite reasonable to expect to feel anger. (That doesn't mean get physically or emotionally abusive though - that will land you in a lot of trouble - even jail!) Anger's not a bad emotion - it's better than despair.

Don't stay angry. Anger is a phase you'll probably go through - it's part of how to cope with the pain of heartbreak, but it isn't the only answer! It takes a lot of energy to stay angry, and the only person who'll hurt is you. Eventually, you'll get bored and exhausted with the anger - so look for signs of that and welcome them as moving on!

Finally, recall that in Chinese the word for "crisis" is also the same as the word for "opportunity." Endings, however they come about, are also new beginnings. Each night, before going to sleep, let your mind tiptoe back through your day and find at least three good things that happened to you today. It maybe as simple as a child smiling at you, seeing a rainbow, hearing a cuckoo or some tune that you love on the radio. Write them down. If you compile these "magic moments" in a notebook that you keep by your bed, in a year you'll have a thousand great memories! And as you keep reaching for these positives, you'll find your life - including your love life - will improve, slowly at first, then faster and faster - as if by magic! This is the best mechanism I know for how to cope with heartbreak! Remember, the greatest revenge is massive success - and when it comes to coping with heartbreak, that success is defined as your personal happiness