Heartbreak — What Helps? Why Asking What to Do Is Already the First Mistake

What helps against heartbreak? The most honest answer to this question is uncomfortable: the question people usually ask — what should I do? — is already the first mistake. “What to do?” looks for the quick way out, for the action that ends the pain. Yet precisely this wish to be rid of it is the movement that does not release heartbreak but buries it. Whoever wants to get over it does not get out by doing something against it, but by ceasing to fight it.

Perhaps you are reading this in the middle of the pain. Perhaps you function outwardly while inwardly something breaks open at every song, every message, every familiar route. And perhaps you have long since combed the internet for advice and found the same ten-point lists everywhere: distract yourself, do sport, meet friends, start something new. It is well meant. But it answers the wrong question. Before you undertake something against the pain again, it is worth looking at what the doing actually is here.

#Heartbreak — what to do? Why the question leads astray

The question “what to do?” leads astray because in heartbreak the doing is mostly a movement of flight. A human being has a deeply rooted inclination to turn away from what hurts, and this turning-away almost always takes the form of activity.

“That is the going-away from the unpleasant. That is this prior movement. I do what is easy and above all what relieves the psychic pressure.”

— Gwendolin Kirchhoff, «Werden wir gelebt?» – HOPE documentary interview (Kai Stuth), 2024 (transl.)

Here the doing does not stand on the side of the solution but on the side of avoidance. I throw myself into work, I fill every evening, I begin the next thing at once — not because it is due, but because it relieves the pressure. The pain does not grow smaller in the process. It only waits until things go quiet. That is why the second, stiller question is the one that leads further: what if you do not have to do anything at all?

“You do not have to decide at all. You do not have to solve the problem in the first place.”

— Gwendolin Kirchhoff, TransitionTV: «Es ist immer das gebrochene Herz» (Elisa Gratias), 2026 (transl.)

A large part of the pressure in heartbreak arises in the first place from the feeling of having to act immediately, to decide, to settle the whole thing somehow. If that compulsion falls away, half the tension falls away with it. Heartbreak is not a problem waiting for a solution. It is a transition that wants to be lived through.

#What is the sedation trap in heartbreak?

The sedation trap is the reach for everything that numbs the pain instead of reaching it — and the entire repertoire of advice lives off it. A human being possesses an astonishing capacity to withdraw from unpleasant feelings: to dissociate, to self-sedate, to go numb, to leave the room, to repress (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, “Es ist immer das gebrochene Herz”, 30:00).

This capacity is no flaw. It has carried us through situations that could not otherwise have been endured. In an acute upheaval a little numbing is sometimes the only thing possible. The trap snaps shut only when the numbing becomes the permanent solution — when distraction, substitutes and diversion take the place of feeling and stay there.

The new contact, barely has the old bond been torn. The glass in the evening that turns one glass into two. The endless scrolling that never lets the silence arise. Gwendolin Kirchhoff describes what happens to a person who permanently circumvents the actual stirring: much then becomes “always a substitute here, a substitute there” (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Werden wir gelebt?”, 33:00, transl.). The substitute calms briefly and leaves a quiet dissonance behind, because it is not what it was about. Precisely here lies the difference between self-soothing and healing: self-soothing smooths the surface inside your own head, healing happens in real encounter, where something is received that you cannot give yourself. Whoever only soothes themselves instead of stepping into contact consolidates the very isolation the pain is coming from.

#What does it mean to turn toward heartbreak?

To turn toward heartbreak means to sense it and to let what you sense count — instead of pushing it aside. Turning toward is not a technique and not one more point on a list. It is the reversal of the movement of flight: not away from the unpleasant, but toward it. Sensing and accepting belong together here — you cannot really perceive a feeling and flee from it at the same time; the sensing is itself already a first yes (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, “Es ist immer das gebrochene Herz”, 45:00). This feeling is no relapse into the merely emotional, which clear understanding would have to mistrust. For Gwendolin Kirchhoff every real feeling is already a thinking — a thought she anchors in early Romanticism, in Schelling (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Werden wir gelebt?”, 13:09). Whoever meets the pain does not become more stupid, but more awake. The opposite holds: every turning-away from your own sensing blunts perception.

“If you cross boundaries that you yourself would not want to have crossed, you separate yourself subtly from your heart, and with that you become stupid.”

— Gwendolin Kirchhoff, TransitionTV: «Es ist immer das gebrochene Herz» (Elisa Gratias), 2026 (transl.)

That is the real price of numbing. It takes from you not only the pain, but also the access to what the pain knows.

#What does heartbreak let you recognize?

Heartbreak lets you recognize how deep a bond reached and what really lies beneath the anger — provided you do not evade it. Unpleasant feelings are not interference to be regulated away; they often contain very precise perceptions, if you do not avoid them and do not numb them but let them come toward you (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Werden wir gelebt?”, 32:00). Whoever goes away loses this perception.

“they actually avoid unpleasant feelings. That is to say, the perception of something is there, but they do not go toward it.”

— Gwendolin Kirchhoff, «Werden wir gelebt?» – HOPE documentary interview (Kai Stuth), 2024 (transl.)

Beneath heartbreak there almost always waits a broken heart: the plain pain of having been left or passed over and not having seen it coming. The anger that often pushes itself in front of it is usually a secondary feeling — easier to carry than the grief beneath, but not the thing itself. If you turn toward it, the pain can show you what you really had in this connection, where an old wound resonates, and which movement actually wants to come to an end. That is not a pleasant way, but a precise one — and it differs from the ground up from passing through the familiar phases of heartbreak, which one endures without listening. How the pain of separation points in detail to your own place is a thread of its own in this weave.

#How do I get over heartbreak — concretely, without a guidebook list?

You do not get over heartbreak with a list of actions, but with a single, unspectacular movement: sitting down and feeling what is, without having to solve it. That sounds like little and is the hardest thing, because it contradicts everything the wish to be rid of it whispers to you. Concretely it means three things.

First: let go of the compulsion to decide. You do not have to know right now whether to fight or leave, to forgive or to close the matter. Leave the question open and only sense what the pain is doing with you. A large part of the distress arises from the felt compulsion to decide immediately in one direction — not from the pain itself.

Second: communicate the pain without expecting a solution.

“this way you can communicate it to a fellow human being. One has to say it, without your needing a solution for it as well.”

— Gwendolin Kirchhoff, TransitionTV: «Es ist immer das gebrochene Herz» (Elisa Gratias), 2026 (transl.)

Not laying the problem before a person for repair, but giving the unvarnished feeling into a space that can bear it. Precisely that is what numbing cannot replace: a counterpart who carries the gap with you instead of placating it. Healing happens in this encounter, not in solitary self-soothing.

Third: do not numb the body, inhabit it. The body is a fine organ of reception; it registers the loss exactly. To quiet it with alcohol, sensory overload or constant occupation cuts off perception. To sense it — in walking, in breathing, in simply sitting there — keeps you connected with what is true right now.

None of this shortens heartbreak artificially. But it stops deepening it. A pain you turn toward does not become lighter at once, yet it becomes permeable. A pain you numb remains and builds layer upon layer over itself.

#The pain is not an enemy

Heartbreak does not become lighter by your declaring it a problem with a solution. It becomes bearable when you stop wanting to be rid of it. “What to do?” is the question of flight; “what do I feel, and what does it want to tell me?” is the question of turning toward. The first numbs, the second heals — more slowly, but really. The pain after a lost love is not a defect of your psyche and not an enemy to be defeated. It is the most precise information your inner life can give about a bond that meant something to you. To feel it is not the opposite of getting over it. It is the only form of getting over it that holds.

If you notice that quickly getting rid of it does not help you — that the grief remains although you have understood everything —, then a conversation may be the space in which the pain is carried with you instead of advised away for the first time: in a philosophical consultation that does not repair but listens, and that leaves the pain as much time as it needs.

#Sources

• Kirchhoff, G. (2024). «Werden wir gelebt?» (Are we being lived?) – HOPE documentary interview [Video]. HOPE-Doku / apolut. https://odysee.com/@apolut:a. (Quotes at approx. 13:09, 32:00, 33:00, 56:16)
• Kirchhoff, G. (2026). «Es ist immer das gebrochene Herz» (It is always the broken heart) [Video]. TransitionTV, YouTube. https://youtube.com/watch?v=PacfD3S-yyU. (Quotes at approx. 22:28, 30:00, 43:29, 45:00)