How to survive a Christmas breakup: the ultimate guide for your mental health

Christmas is well known as the season of joy: bright lights, delicious food, time with friends and family. However, for many of us, the change in routine, dark evenings and cold weather, can trigger mental health struggles – most particularly, if we’re going through a break-up.

The end of a relationship can be incredibly painful at any time of the year – but the pressure to socalise and immerse yourself in festive joy when your heart is breaking, makes a December breakup particularly brutal. With this in mind, we’ve put together a break-up survival guide, to help you navigate your emotions, invest in yourself and your wellbeing, and find hope on the other side.

Tip 1: Let yourself grieve – and feel all your feelings

We all understand and expect grief when it comes to the death of a loved one. Workplaces are legally obligated to give us time off, and family and friends rally around us. But what most people don’t know, is that going through the pain of a break-up can often feel similar to grieving a death.

Although the person you are no longer dating may still be here physically, you are grieving the loss of their presence in your life, as well as the future you may have been imagining with them.

My biggest piece of advice is this: don’t try to repress your feelings. Accept that, even though the festive season is approaching and commercialised happiness is everywhere, it is truly OK not to feel OK. Trying to stop yourself from experiencing painful emotions is like trying to push beach-ball underwater while you’re floating in a deep sea. No matter how forcefully you try and push it down, up it pops again – and the harder you try to get the ball under the water, the more vigorously it re-emerges. Rather than fighting your feelings, allow your emotions to simply be there. When they feel particularly overwhelming, imagine allowing them to wash over you like waves, without resisting. Eventually, you will find that their intensity fades.

I see a lot of advice around break-ups that is along the lines of ‘how fast can I get over this?’ or ‘How can I win my break-up?’. First of all, don’t think about your break-up as a competition between yourself and your ex that only one of you can ‘win’. It’s not about who can move on first, or stop feeling sad first. Now is the time to focus on yourself. You won’t heal faster by worrying about what they are thinking. There’s no set timeline for grief – and the faster you stop shaming yourself over experiencing it, and allow it to come as it is, raw and unpredictable, the sooner you will feel better.

Exercises that might help

Try writing in a journal
Journals can be great places to write unfiltered. When speaking to friends or family, we sometimes worry we’re talking for too long, repeating ourselves or being negative. In a journal we are free to express ourselves without filters, without trying to find an upside to our loss, and without putting on a brave face. Don’t feel like you have to make sense or write beautiful prose; no one is grading this – it’s just for your benefit. Likewise, write for however long suits you. As little as a few minutes can make a difference, but you might find it’s so helpful that you write for longer. Give yourself some space before you go back to everyday life after writing, it can bring up some raw emotions and you don’t want to have to rush.

Name your emotions
We can’t deal with our emotions if we can’t name them. Get specific. Do you feel sadness, guilt, fear, anger, betrayal, worry, numbness, gratitude, regret, jealousy, overwhelm, dread, resignation, relief, resentment and/or calmness? Name as many emotions as you can.

Tell your story
Speak to safe people and share your experience. Talking helps!

Support
There are support groups for many types of grief, and having peers who are experiencing something similar to us can offer great comfort. These can be places where we are able to share our feelings without worrying about being a burden or being judged. Many who attend these groups say they make them feel less lonely, give them a safe space to be honest, improve their coping skills and help to restore hope.

Tip 2: Look after your mental wellbeing with these exercises

When you’re going through the pain of a break up, taking care of yourself is often the last thing on your mind, as you try to get through each day.

But small steps are still steps, and doing just one thing to care for your physical or mental health can make a whole lot of difference. Ultimately, the only relationship you can guarantee your entire life, is the one you have with yourself. Showing yourself compassion and patience, rather than criticism, can help you heal much faster and increase your resilience in the face of painful life events.

When you can’t see the end of the tunnel, look for pinpricks of light

Break-ups can make us feel seriously hopeless at times. No matter how long or short the relationship was, when it ends, we can feel like we’ve been plunged into darkness. With no set date for when we’ll definitely feel better, it can be really hard to see a light at the end of the tunnel.

When it feels like brighter days will never appear, my advice is this – stop looking for the end of the tunnel. Instead, look for the light all around you, in the darkness. For example, It could be friends or family who love you, and are willing to talk through the break-up with you, or just sit and be with you when you can’t find the words. It could be a mental health charity with a helpline that you can call, including Samaritans, where specially trained volunteers will pick up at any time of the day or night. Perhaps it’s the warmth of a pet who needs you. Whatever it is, look for those pinpricks of light breaking through in the darkness. Sometimes, the best way to cope is to focus on getting through the next hour in front of you, and then the next hour, holding on to the light around you, not just waiting for the dark time to end.

The following exercise can be a helpful way to face the feelings of depression that can arise from a break-up, and move through it.

SEEK LIFT exercise

SEEK
See the bigger picture Exercise regularly
Enjoy – plan fun and creativity
Kindness to yourself

LIFT
Look after your body
Interact – connect with others
Find meaning
Take notice

See the bigger picture

Depression, grief and sadness over a break-up can feel all-consuming, but it is not who we are or the full picture of our lives. If you were to watch five minutes of a film and make all your judgements about the characters in that five minutes, it is likely that you would jump to some wrong conclusions. Where you are now is just one chapter of your life, so what’s the rest of your story? Can you step back from how you feel and think? What would a friend say about your situation?

Exercise regularly

Keeping ourselves mobile and taking regular exercise can help to increase energy levels, diminish stress and boost mood. We don’t need to spend hours doing something we hate. Find an activity you enjoy and do it, even if it’s only for five minutes a day.
Enjoy – plan fun and creativity

Planning ahead can be tough when you think you won’t be well enough to enjoy going on holiday, to the cinema or out for a meal. When you’re going through a break-up and you’re struggling with your emotions, your mind can often tell you not to plan good things because your presence might stop other people enjoying themselves. Don’t listen to this lie! Make sure you go ahead and book in something you love doing regardless of how you feel or how worried you are – it will always give you a lift.

Kindness to yourself
We talk to ourselves more than we talk to any other person. Ever. It’s not possible to overestimate the power of speaking kindly and positively to yourself, just as you would to a friend. Instead of heaping guilt on yourself and picking over your perceived faults, what would a more compassionate approach look like? What if you were to focus on some of your strengths? Try treating yourself the same way you would a friend you love, and see how much it helps.

Tip 3: Manage anxious thoughts post break-up. Here’s now:

It’s pretty common to expect sadness after a break-up, but a struggle with what is sometimes gut-punching anxiety can take us by surprise. In the aftermath of a break-up, we may wrestle with intrusive anxious thoughts over our self-worth or whether we will ever meet the right person for us. However, worrying never solves anything – it only makes us think we are being productive. Here’s some exercises you can do to ease anxiety:

Take the thought to court

What is the key thought that is causing you anxiety at the moment? Write it down, then ‘put in in the dock’.

Write down the evidence that this thought is true, aiming for hard facts.

Now, cross-examine the thought. Is it opinion or fact? What evidence suggests it’s true?

Looking at both sides, come up with a ‘closing statement’ that provides a balanced overview based on all the evidence.

What could be an alternative thought?
Struggling to sleep?

Struggling to sleep is really common after a break-up, but it can feel really frustrating as you toss and turn anxiously. Here’s a brilliant tip: if you can’t sleep after twenty minutes, get up and do something else. Try not to do anything stimulating, but perhaps make a non-caffeinated drink, read a favourite book, listen to some calming music and head back to bed when you feel yourself getting sleepy. When in bed, close your eyes and picture a walk you’ve done many times. Mentally take yourself on that walk, noticing all the detail you can from the moment you put on your shoes and leave the house, right through to the sounds and smells as you walk. Keep doing the same mental walk each night, and your mind will begin to associate it with relaxation and going to sleep.