How To Fall Out Of Love With Someone: 4 Scientific Tricks
Love has always been defined as something we cannot control It comes, like a weather phenomenon, affects us in a way that depends on our personality and our experience with past relationships, and sometimes it goes away.
However, there are times when feeling love for certain people is clearly counterproductive and we know that, although it is in our best interest to stop feeling that kind of affection for someone, that is an option that is beyond our possibilities. Despite this, there are certain habits and behaviors that make it more likely that we will end up falling out of love with someone.
Although it sounds crude, stopping feeling love for someone can even be good for your health. It is, clearly, in those cases in which there is a toxic relationship in which abuse and physical and verbal violence are common, but also in those in which there is unrequited love.
The point is that the course of our thoughts does not always go in the direction we want or that produces greater well-being. Much of this is because those memories, ideas and images that come into the focus of our consciousness tend to escape our control.
We can decide more or less on which details or aspects to focus our attention, but the topics that occupy our minds are not usually chosen by us. Or, rather, we choose to call up certain memories and analyze them, but We don’t have the full power to make them go away and we cannot avoid being taken by surprise from time to time: that is part of the normal functioning of our brain.
However, just because this is normal does not mean that, under certain circumstances, this phenomenon of memories that come to mind cannot become real headaches; especially, If those memories have to do with past relationships, heartbreaks and broken hearts
So, how to take action on the matter? Saying that we want to fall out of love is easier than doing it, but that does not mean that it is impossible to make this type of feeling weaken in favor of our well-being and personal autonomy. Below you can read some keys to achieve it
1. Regulate physical and visual contact
Looking into each other’s eyes and touching each other are two situations: both trigger the production of oxytocin in our body, a hormone related to affection and the establishment of bonds of trust. In turn, a greater amount of oxytocin in our blood and in the spaces through which the neurons in our brain communicate cause emotions and behaviors related to love to appear. In fact, this occurs even when looking into the eyes of certain domestic animals.
Therefore, one of the first steps to disengage from a person whose relationship is harmful to us is make this physical and visual contact poorer and scarcer although at that moment you want to do the opposite.
2. Learn to live away from that person
Another important aspect when falling out of love is make things easy for ourselves at first by avoiding having to see that person, at least for a few days or weeks If love consists, among other things, of thinking about that someone for a good part of the day, to reverse this dynamic it is good not to expose ourselves to situations in which we have to think about them forcibly because they are in front of us.
In many ways, love works like a drug, since both when it comes to seeing the person we love and when consuming an addictive substance, the reward circuit of our brain is activated, based especially on the neurotransmitter called dopamine.
Therefore, gradually reducing the number of times it is activated will be necessary for our brain to adjust to the new lifestyle. Although, yes, this is something that is difficult to do and requires effort. That is why before undertaking this task it is good to imagine a priori possible excuses that we can give ourselves to go see that person; In this way we can recognize them as such when they appear.
To rebuild a life as a person far from the person we used to think about, it is not only necessary to stop thinking about them, but also find activities to prevent this from happening If we do all the things we did when we were in love, our brain will notice that the only missing piece of the puzzle is the presence of that person, and this incongruence will cause us problems. On the other hand, if we make the separation from that person coincide in time with other significant changes in our lives that are related to our routine, it will be easier for us to commit to this transition phase.
Furthermore, inventing new ways of living day to day will make it more possible for us to consider activities that have little to do with life as a person in love, thus the chances of thinking about the person we had feelings for decrease: simply, the references to it will be scarcer.
In short, in the style of what behavioral psychologists like BF Skinner proposed, if we want to make our lives change we can keep in mind that the most important thing is to change the environment and the activities to which we are usually exposed, rather than trying to modify ourselves without moving a muscle.
4. Work on self-esteem
Sometimes, The failure of the relationship project with someone is a serious blow to self-esteem That is why to the previous behavioral guidelines we must add a constant evaluation of our self-image and self-esteem. If not, it is easy for us, feeling invalid as people, to desperately seek to be with the other person again, to better accept ourselves.
To do this, it is necessary to try to make an analysis that is as cold and distanced as possible of who we are, what we do and what defines us, taking into account the events we have experienced. That is, it is not about thinking of ourselves as entities independent of our environment: what matters is realizing how we behave with the means we have and depending on our objectives and interests.
Managing attention
Having read these keys to falling out of love with someone, you may have realized that almost all of them are based on a common theme: attention. Knowing how to manage our attention focus makes us concentrate on those things that are really necessary or useful to us and, therefore, helps us get away from rumination, that process similar to a vicious circle by which almost everything we do or perceive reminds us of what makes us feel bad: as we feel sad, we think about what causes that, and as we think about what causes that, we feel sad.
Therefore, the key is to intervene both in our thoughts and in our actions to break this seemingly infinite loop of comparisons and sadness. Start imposing a certain discipline on ourselves in what we do, even if the body asks us to do something else, it is essential to stop being emotionally dependent on that person with whom one day we fall in love. And, of course, if we believe that the problem is so intense that it totally interferes with our quality of life, it is worth considering whether it is appropriate go to psychotherapy sessions In any case, the engine of change must always be ourselves.
