You can’t eat.
You can’t smile without forcing it.
You can’t stop thinking about him.
You can’t stop thinking about what happened.
You feel terrible, you look terrible, and all you want is for him to be suffering as much as you are.
In the midst of your misery, you come to me.
I offer you something called “overnight therapy.”
I promise that this therapeutic technique will help you put your breakup in perspective and take the emotional sting out of it. Used regularly, it will help you shake off those painful feelings, until your ex is just another guy you used to know.
Plus, it will make you look both younger AND more attractive.
Are you in?
Before I tell you what the technique is, let me tell you how it works.
When you’re under acute stress, your body responds as if you’re under attack. Adrenaline floods your body, along with its brain equivalent, noradrenaline.
Noradrenaline makes you feel wired. You find yourself completely obsessed and focused on every little thing related to the breakup. You might even feel anxious and panicky. Everything feels like an emergency.
What we want to do is dampen down that noradrenaline response, so that you can process the trauma of the breakup from a calm, emotionally safe place.
But thinking about what happened is difficult. It takes energy you don’t have.
That’s why we’re going to put the difficult work of processing the breakup on autopilot. This technique will extract life lessons from the breakup for you, without retraumatizing you by recalling painful details.
Sound good?
But you don’t just want to get over him.
You want to make sure he knows EXACTLY what he’s lost.
So this technique will also make you look your best: fresh, energized, and attractive.
And, because you don’t have a lot of time or money to spare, this technique is completely free, takes no skill whatsoever, and can be done from the comfort of your own home.
Want to know what it is?
It’s dreaming.
Dr. Matt Walker is director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at UC Berkeley. He’s a prolific researcher who’s published over a hundred studies on sleep.
He came up with the theory that it’s “not time that heals all wounds, but rather time spent in dream sleep.”[1]
He set out to prove it by showing a group of young people a series of emotionally charged images. Then he measured their brain’s response with an MRI scan. He tested the study participants again 12 hours later, to see if their emotional response to the images had changed.
But he tweaked one thing:
Half the study participants got a good night’s sleep in between the tests, while the other half remained awake.
The participants who’d slept a full 8 hours in between tests were significantly less emotionally affected the second time around.
The participants who hadn’t slept weren’t as lucky. They reacted just as negatively the second time around, if not more so.
That study was just the beginning. Dr. Walker later discovered that a specific kind of dreaming is most effective for processing painful memories:
Dreams about the emotional themes of the experience.
So if you dream about your ex, being abandoned, feeling alone, or even finding love again, then you’re well on your way to emotional healing—even if it doesn’t always feel like it in those immediate moments upon awakening.
It’s emotionally easier to process painful memories in dreams than it is while you’re awake. That’s because levels of noradrenaline in your brain drop while you’re dreaming, creating a “neurochemically calm” environment. (PTSD sufferers are the exception.)
Sleep can also ensure that you stay cool, calm, and collected when you see your ex again.
Sleep is critical to maintaining emotional balance. You can find yourself hyperreactive or overly emotional after just one night of suboptimal sleep. Go for a week on not enough sleep, and you can find yourself bursting into tears just because you’re out of cereal for breakfast.
Dr. Walker makes a strong case that getting 8 hours of sleep a night is the single most important thing we can do for our physical and mental health—even more important, he says, than diet and exercise.
So the next time something happens to you that’s emotionally devastating, carve out time to sleep and dream. This “overnight therapy” will help you heal night after night, until that ex of yours no longer has any relevance to your happy, amazing life.
[1] Why We Sleep (New York: Scribner, 2017) 207.
James that was very interesting, but does that mean by 4am or 5am we should be able to get back to sleep again? i find, once I am awake, I can give up on the idea of going back to sleep, except right at the time I HAVE to get up.
Hi Maree. We tend to do most of our dreaming (REM phase of sleep) in the early morning hours just before dawn. If you find yourself waking early but then feeling sleepy again after laying in bed for awhile, you might benefit from just getting up when you first wake up so that you sleep more soundly the following night. (It could take 2-3 days for this to work).
I was in a long term relationship with a lot of problems. I did a lot of things wrong to him in 2017, and we have tried to recover from that. I have a problem with being honest. I am madly in love with this guy, and our relationship is falling apart. In fact, he broke it off with me, and we still are living together. I have been so heartbroken, that I cannot fall asleep until I am exhausted. I take sleep medication. I am waking up at 3:00am and 6:00am almost every day, and that’s with sleep medication. He has never cheated on me. I was the problem. I am just struggling, exhausted, and just making myself get out of bed. What do I do?
Hi Amanda,
Thanks so much for your comment! Sometimes we have to get help for ourselves before we can get help for our relationships and I feel like you’d greatly benefit from being a part of our community and some back and forth consultation. I recommend that you bring it up in our private forum where we have actual relationship coaches on staff to answer questions and give advice. To access this forum, you would need to sign up for the Irresistible Insiders Club.
Within this private community, you can also ask questions and share experiences with like-minded women and our most advanced members. This way you can get extra real-time feedback and support for your unique situation.
Warm wishes,
Tracey T.
I’m with you Mila. I just found out he’s been cheating the whole time – I got married two months ago. I feel like I’d rather be dead than go through this to be honest.
Even if you get sleep how do you get rid of the trauma of being hurt. Of someone cheating on you and breaking your heart. I have good days and bad days. But I have certain triggers and trust issues now. Does it get better ?
Collette, I agree with you. In an ideal world, even when we have been dumped we should make a point of getting the 8 hours sleep so that we can wake up bright and bouncy, but the ideal world does not exist after a separation. So we lie awake at night or wake in the early hours and cannot get back to sleep and when we drag ourselves out of bed the next morning we look like something the cat has dragged in
This is worthy advice – but the trouble is that the break-up and events that led to it can be so painful that I (and I imagine some others) wake in the early hours, thoughts and emotions whirring and then are too troubled and restless to return to sleep. So, if sleep can be controlled under such stress, I am sure that this could be a ‘solution’. But it is precisely during these times that sleep is difficult to achieve. (I am, admittedly a light sleeper and prone to insomnia. It may not be everyones experience).
Good point, Colette.
I read an article recently that said we humans are prone to waking up with worry around 2:00 AM or 3:00 AM. The article said that our worries tend to seem more terrible and insurmountable that time of night, which they hypothesize is due to chemical changes going on around that time with cortisol increasing. The author warned that we should not try to think it through or argue with our worries when we wake up in a cold sweat like that because he said it’s better to just label it as “night worry” and disengage from the battle till morning.
I thought that was interesting and fairly true in my experience. And you’re right, when the stress prevents us from sleeping well, it is a bit of a catch-22 scenario that’s hard to overcome.