Five Practices That Carried Matthew Hussey Through the Worst Heartbreak of His Life
Matthew Hussey
Matthew Hussey is a dating and relationship coach whose videos on heartbreak have been watched widely. In this video he describes the breakup he calls the greatest heartbreak of his life, and he asks what actually helped when knowing the right advice was no longer enough. His answer is five practices he says were "essential and life-saving" during that period. He adds that he can't cover them in the depth he'd like here.
When knowing the advice meant nothing
Hussey says he remembers the breakup vividly. He remembers where he was, and he says he didn't see it coming at all. He describes breaking down without warning in restaurants while out with his family, because he was not coping with suddenly having been broken up with.
At one point he went looking for wisdom on YouTube and found that the most viral videos on heartbreak were his own. For Hussey this was the turning point. Talking about what he knew "meant nothing." What would save him was practicing everything he had learned and taught to others. The five practices below are what that looked like for him.
1. Changing your relationship with painful emotions
The first thing Hussey had to learn was how to cope with the intensity of what he felt: pain, loss, fear, anxiety, grief, depression and regret. He says these emotions can destabilize mental health, take away joy, and make it impossible to fully live one's own life. This applies both to people newly heartbroken and to those who have been stuck for a long time.
His central claim is that the emotions themselves don't determine the quality of life during heartbreak. The relationship a person develops with those emotions does. For him, that meant learning the difference between emotion and thought.
The emotions were bad enough on their own: the deep sense of loss, the grief, the pain of a whole area of his life disappearing. What made it far worse, he says, was the story attached to it. He gives examples of the thoughts running through his head:
- "This was my person and I lost them."
- "I'll never meet anyone like this again."
- "This makes me not good enough."
- "If I had been more this, more that, this person wouldn't have left."
Hussey calls each of these a story or a thought pattern, not a feeling. In his account, these thoughts took emotions that were already painful and compounded them into something "truly unbearable and catastrophic."
He uses a bee sting to show the difference. If a bee stung you right now, he says, you probably wouldn't build a self-defeating story around it. You wouldn't berate yourself for leaving the window open or decide you're always the kind of person who does that. You'd notice it hurts, find it annoying, and treat the sting.
In heartbreak, he argues, people are so busy thinking and constructing stories that they don't treat the wound. They don't sit with the pain. Sitting with the pain and staying present with it is what gives a person the chance to move through it. The thinking keeps someone ruminating, and in his framing it turns pain into suffering.
2. Learning to stop thinking about the ex
The second practice was learning techniques to stop thinking about the person he had lost. Hussey describes compulsive rumination about an ex as a hallmark of heartbreak. He says people spend so much time in their heads that they end up "fracturing" themselves: wearing one mask at work or at dinner with friends while living in a private world of pain.
He describes how almost everything becomes a road back to the ex: places, pictures, people, sounds, music. Even seeing someone else who is happy can lead back to thoughts of what was lost. This is why, no matter how many good things are in someone's life, heartbreak can make it feel like nothing else matters. In his words, it can switch a person off to the love they do have, to friends who are showing up for them, to what's happening in their career, and "to everything beautiful."
What helped him was the realization that the world outside the ex is far bigger than the world of the ex. There are so many people and experiences that no one could experience them all "in a thousand lifetimes, let alone our short life."
His argument is that as a person adds new pieces to their life, they create new firsts and new associations. The ex then becomes a smaller and smaller part of their overall map of the world, and what remains is an expansive terrain to explore. Hussey is careful to say this doesn't make grief vanish overnight. His point is that a grief that first felt like the whole universe gradually becomes a smaller part of it, and the person begins to see that life holds much more than the one they lost.
3. Knowing what reliably makes you feel better, and what makes you feel worse
The third practice was being "hyper aware" that some things would make him feel better and others would reliably make him feel worse.
He borrows a framing from his brother: the hangover recovery method versus the athlete recovery method. In the hangover method, you feel awful after a night of drinking, so you watch trashy TV, eat greasy food, and maybe drink again to try to feel better. The athlete method is very different.
To illustrate it, Hussey tells a story from the height of his heartbreak. He went to a jiu-jitsu class he had attended for years. The professor, Cobrinha, happened to be there, and Hussey told him he was going through a really bad time and was badly heartbroken. Hussey says that in that state he was just searching for anything that would help. Cobrinha told him that he had suffered an injury, just as people do on the mats, except this time it was his heart. But an injured heart didn't mean he couldn't train every other part of himself. On the mats, you train everything else so that when the injury heals, the rest of you is ready to go.
From this, Hussey urges viewers to watch for what reliably makes them feel worse. His examples are alcohol, drugs, not sleeping, hooking up, and chasing a rebound relationship. He describes heartbreak as having a kind of energy that "wants to go somewhere." The job is to direct that energy toward things that help.
The helpful things he names are modest: a gym session, drinking enough water, getting more sleep tonight, a meditation, and the right journaling prompts. He is explicit that none of these will make someone feel better instantly. His claim is that their accumulation changes things bit by bit. He points to a second benefit: doing these things makes people proud of themselves. He describes that pride as a strong antidote to the self-loathing and damage to self-esteem that heartbreak can cause.
4. Reclaiming confidence through integration
The fourth thing Hussey had to do was reclaim his confidence. He describes heartbreak as "like the death of our ego," sometimes a catastrophic blow to a person's sense of worth.
The damage deepens, he says, through the stories people tell themselves afterward. If I'd been sexier, more attractive, had a better body, been taller, more impressive, more charismatic, or less insecure, they would have stayed. His warning is to be careful about trusting thoughts in moments of vulnerability. Those thoughts will feel like the truth, he says, but they are a truth generated by a person's worst fears, and they lead to catastrophic places.
In his view, what wrecks confidence is the belief that the flaw is all a person is. People forget that they are also someone who can own themselves, take charge, and has genuinely good qualities. Hussey's position is that everyone is all of those things at once.
So, he argues, the secret to confidence is not being bulletproof but "integration." Insecure, catastrophic thinking says you are only this bad thing, and that's why they didn't want you. The integrated response is: of course I'm not only that bad thing; I'm all these good things as well. Once a person sees that they are many things, they get to choose which of those things to lean into. Hussey calls this the beginning of confidence.
5. Letting go of control
The fifth lesson was letting go. Hussey describes an instinctive urge after a breakup to make it work, win the person back, or otherwise control the situation and its outcome. That urge to control extends to moving on as well. Resolving to find someone quickly, or to find someone better, is in his view the same effort to control things, just aimed in a different direction.
He sees a kind of beauty in acknowledging "I got heartbroken, I am heartbroken" and deciding not to try to control the outcome. Instead, a person does "the next right thing." He is clear that this doesn't rule out taking action. He gives examples:
- having one more conversation with the ex, if you feel you need it;
- after a long relationship, suggesting couples therapy to see whether it can be worked out, or just whether they're open to it;
- writing a letter explaining how you feel and why you think they're making a terrible decision.
"There's nothing stopping you doing that," he says. The key is to do what you feel you need to do or can do, and then make peace with whatever happens next. He links this to how he thinks about anxiety: do what you can, then be disciplined about getting on with your day. Here, that means being disciplined about getting on with your life.
He also calls for humility about not knowing what's coming. People believe they know what's best for them, and after a breakup that usually means the ex turning around and coming back. Hussey says "nowhere is it written" that this would be the best thing. Sometimes, he says, life has to be allowed to unfold, and that is what letting go means.
When the heartbreak has lasted too long
Hussey ends with a question for people who have been stuck on someone for a long time. Over time, it's normal to feel occasional remnants of grief. But if someone is past the acute stage of heartbreak and still locked in a story about the person, he says they need to explore why that is: what is going on, and why they aren't allowing themselves to move forward with their life. He doesn't answer that question in this video. He says it deserves its own examination.
He closes by returning to his own experience. He calls that heartbreak one of the worst times of his life and says he feels honored to be there for people who are now going through one of the worst times in theirs.
I still remember the greatest heartbreak of my life. And today I'm going to talk about it. I remember it really well. I remember where I was. I remember that I didn't see it coming at all. I remember the moments of breaking down sporadically in restaurants with my family because I was not coping with the new predicament I found myself in of having been broken up with.
I remember searching for wisdom on YouTube and discovering that all of the most viral videos on heartbreak were my own videos. This was a moment where talking about what I knew meant nothing. Practicing everything I had ever learned and spoken about and taught to everybody else was the way that I was going to save myself.
So, in this video, I want to talk about the five things that I did that proved to be essential and life-saving in one of the hardest moments of my life. I'm not going to be able to go through all five of these in nearly as much detail as I want, but that's okay because tomorrow I am starting 5 Days to Mend, where I am going to be with every one of you who is heartbroken right now for an hour a day, taking you through in-depth all of the things that can help you move forward. I promise you by the end of this week you're going to feel better. It starts tomorrow. You can sign up at mendweek.com, and it's free. So, come join us.
So, the first one is I truly had to learn how to cope with the severe emotions that I was feeling at that time around pain and loss. Now, look, whether we are newly in the throes of heartbreak or we have been stuck there for some time, the emotions can feel unbearable. Fear, anxiety, grief, depression, regret, all of these things can destabilize our mental health, rob us of our joy, and make it impossible to fully inhabit our own lives.
But here's what I learned. It is not these emotions themselves that dictate the quality of our life when we're heartbroken. It is the relationship we develop with those emotions. For me, this meant understanding the difference between emotion and thought. The emotions, the deep sense of loss, the grief, the pain of this area of my life going away, that alone was awful. But what made it far worse was all the story that went with it.
The story of this was my person and I lost them. That was a story, that was a thought pattern. The story of I'll never meet anyone like this again. Story. The thought of this makes me not good enough. If I had been more this, more that, this person wouldn't have left. All of these thoughts took what were already painful emotions and compounded them into something truly unbearable and catastrophic.
The way that I look at the difference between emotion and thought is if a bee stung you right now, you probably wouldn't have a lot of self-defeating thought or story around that. You wouldn't say, "I can't believe I left the window open and that allowed the bee to fly in and sting me. I'm such an idiot. I am always that person who leaves the window open." You wouldn't do that. You just have a bee stung you. It would hurt. You'd be like, "Ow, that hurts. It's annoying. It's frustrating. I need to treat this with something." Right? You treat the wound.
In heartbreak, we're so busy thinking and constructing story that we don't actually treat the wound. We don't sit with the pain. And by sitting with the pain and being present with the pain, we actually give ourselves a chance to move through it. The thought is what keeps us in rumination about it and makes the pain turn into suffering. On day one of 5 Days to Mend, I'm going to show you some ways to really employ this and we'll go through a bunch of examples.
But let me move on to the second thing that was necessary for me to get through my heartbreak. I had to learn techniques to stop thinking about this person. Compulsive rumination about an ex is a hallmark of heartbreak. And we spend so much time in our heads that we end up fracturing ourselves. We wear one mask when we go to work or when we're at dinner with friends. Internally, we are in a private world of pain.
It's easy for everything to remind us of that person we have lost. Places, pictures, people, sounds, music, all of these things feel like roads that lead back to thoughts of them. Even just seeing someone else who's happy can lead us back to thinking about what we have lost. It's why a time of heartbreak, no matter how many good things there are in your life, it can feel like nothing else matters to you. That can switch us off to the love we do have in our lives. It can switch us off to the friendships that are showing up for us, the things that are happening in our career. It can literally shut us down to everything beautiful.
The truth that really helped me, and I think it will help you, too, if you can connect to it, is that actually the world outside of your ex is far, far, far bigger than the world of your ex. It's massive. There are so many people in the world. There are so many experiences to be had in the world. We couldn't possibly experience everything and everyone there is to experience in a thousand lifetimes, let alone our short life.
But the more we start to add new pieces of our life in, the more we start to create new firsts, new associations, that person starts to become a smaller and smaller part of our overall map of the world. And what it's given way to is this hugely expansive terrain that we now get to explore. This doesn't mean that the grief of losing someone goes away overnight, but what started as a grief that felt like it was the universe starts to become a smaller and smaller and smaller part of our universe. We start to realize that there is so much more to life than this person that we have lost.
The third thing that saved me in my heartbreak was being hyper-aware that there were things that were going to make me feel better, and there were things that were reliably going to make me feel worse. My brother talks about this as the difference between the hangover recovery method and the athlete recovery method. The hangover recovery method is you went out drinking, you feel awful the next day, and then when you're in that mode, what do we do? We watch trashy TV, we eat greasy food, maybe even we start drinking again to try and feel better with the hair of the dog. The athlete recovery method is very different to that.
I remember in the height of my heartbreak, going into a jiu-jitsu class that I'd been doing for years, and the professor was there at the time. I went up to him, his name's Cobrinha, and I said, "I'm going through a really bad time right now. I'm massively heartbroken." At the time, when you're in that kind of heartbreak, you're just searching. You just want anything to feel better.
And he said, "You have suffered an injury, the same way we do here on the mats. You've got an injury, in this case it's your heart. Your heart's been injured. Okay, great, so that's injured, but that doesn't mean we can't train every other part of our body. Because that's what you would do here. You train everything else, so that as this heals, when it does heal, everything else is ready to go."
So, be hyper-aware of the things that you know are going to make you feel worse. Whether it's alcohol, whether it's drugs, whether it's not sleeping, whether it's hooking up, trying to have a rebound relationship. You know that these things are reliably going to make you feel worse. You have energy right now, right? There's a kind of energy to heartbreak. There's energy there. It wants to go somewhere. Our job is to direct that energy to the things that are going to make us feel better, not worse.
And look, one gym session, drinking enough water today, getting more sleep tonight, doing a meditation, the right journaling prompts when you're heartbroken, which on Mend Week next week I will show you, they're not going to make us feel better instantly. But the accumulation of these things starts to change the game bit by bit. It also has the added effect of making us proud of ourselves, and becoming proud of ourselves is a wonderful antidote to the self-loathing and the self-esteem damage that we can get during heartbreak.
By the way, when we do Mend Week this week, it's not just going to be me going live for an hour a day, maybe longer on some days, you know me, we'll see, but I'm also going to be giving you access to Matthew AI free of charge for these days that we do this together because I want you to have 24/7 access, even when we're not live together, to me and my brain so that if at 2:00 a.m. you're struggling with your heartbreak and you're having these anxious or ruminating thoughts, you can still talk to me. You can still have that conversation that you need that is going to reassure you and make yourself feel better. I'm also creating a special part of my Love Life app specifically for everyone going through heartbreak right now that you'll be able to access for free during 5 Days to Mend so that you can go through this with other people in a private, safe space.
The fourth thing I had to do in the worst heartbreak of my life was reclaim my confidence. Heartbreak is like the death of our ego. It is a catastrophic blow sometimes to our sense of worth. And what happens in heartbreak is we start telling ourselves stories that further damage our confidence. If I had been more sexy, more attractive, if I had had a better body, if I had been taller, if I had been more impressive, if I had been more charismatic, if I hadn't been so insecure, they would have stayed.
Be careful of trusting your thoughts in the moments where you're already vulnerable. They will lead you to catastrophic places. They will feel like the truth. But they are a truth that is generated by your worst fears. What wrecks our confidence is the story that that's all we are. That we're not also someone who can own themselves. We're not also someone who can take charge. That we're not also someone who has really amazing qualities, who does believe in themselves in these ways. We're all those things.
So, the secret to confidence is not being bulletproof. The secret to confidence is integration. It's realizing that your insecurity, the catastrophic thinking, is telling you you are only this bad thing, and that's why they didn't want you. Instead of saying, of course I'm not only that bad thing. I'm all these good things as well. When you realize you are many things, you simply get to choose which of those things you are going to lean into. And that is the beginning of confidence.
The fifth thing I learned was to let go. When we go through a breakup, we have this instinctive urge to make it work, to win them back, to try to control the situation somehow. Even try and control the outcome of it all. I'm going to find someone really quickly. I'm going to find someone better than them. Whatever way we go, whether it's getting them back or trying to move on fast or whatever, we're working so hard to control the situation.
And there's a beauty in being like, yeah, I got heartbroken. I am heartbroken. And I am not going to try to control the outcome of all of this. I'm going to do the next right thing. If I'm feeling like I need one more conversation with them, if I'm feeling like we've been together for a very long time and I want to recommend that the two of us get therapy together to see if we can work it out, even just to see if they're open to it. If I feel like I need to write them a letter explaining how I feel and explaining that I think they're making a terrible decision, you can do that. There's nothing stopping you doing that.
Do the thing that you feel you need to do or can do. And then make peace with whatever happens next. It's almost like you have to do the thing that you could do. I think about anxiety this way. Do the thing that you can do. And then be really disciplined about getting on with your day. In this case, be really disciplined about doing the thing you can do and then getting on with your life.
And having the humility to know that you have no idea what is coming. We don't always know what is best for us. What is the next best thing to happen? We think we do. In this case, usually we think the best thing is that our ex has a turnaround and comes back for us and that we end up together. But nowhere is it written that that's true. That may not be the best thing. We don't necessarily know what's best. Sometimes we have to let life unfold.
That means letting go. And if we've been stuck on someone for a while, we have to explore why that is. What is happening here that I've gone past the acute stage of heartbreak and instead of just occasionally feeling the remnants of grief, which happens over time, I'm still locked in this story about this person? We have to explore what's going on there and why we aren't allowing ourselves to move forward with our life.
And for those of you coming to Mend Week with me, we're going to do that on day five. It's going to be an incredible five days together. It's going to be really healing for the people involved. I can't wait. I know that this was one of the worst times in my life when I went through it, and I'm really honored to be able to be there for you who, in one way or another, are going through one of the worst times in your life, too.
I will see you tomorrow for day one of Mend Week. mendweek.com is the link. Thank you for watching. Leave me a comment, and I'll see you soon.
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