How to Heal a Broken Heart: The Ache in Your Chest and What Helps

Heartbreak doesn't mend by being explained, distracted or replaced. How to heal a broken heart when the ache lives in your chest, and a way to feel it.

Rytis Violeta By Rytis & Violeta
Updated
A woman with long hair holding a large black umbrella walking away along a tree-lined street on a misty cloudy day.

It’s late and the house is too quiet. You keep picking up the phone and putting it down. There’s an ache right in the middle of your chest, so physical you’ve wondered if something is wrong with your heart.

You’ve read his old messages again. You’ve built the whole case in your head, twice. You’ve told your friends you’re fine, mostly.

And somewhere under all of it there’s a question you’re almost embarrassed to type. How long is this going to hurt?

We can’t tell you that. Nobody honestly can. What we can tell you is that the pain in your chest isn’t a sign that you’re weak or that you’re doing this wrong. It’s a feeling that wants to move. And most of what we’re told to do with heartbreak keeps it from moving.

Heartbreak pain in the chest: why it hurts like this

The ache is not in your imagination. Maybe for you it’s a stone under the breastbone, a hollow behind the ribs, a band around the chest that tightens when a song comes on. That’s how a feeling shows up. Not as an idea, but as something you can put your finger on.

“If you have a heavy thought, there is something heavy in your body.” With a broken heart, it often works the other way round too. The heavy thing in your chest sends up the thoughts. Why did he. What if I had. Who is she.

The mind treats the ache like a problem with an answer. If it can only understand what happened, the hurt will stop. So it replays. It analyzes. It reads the last conversation one more time. And the chest keeps aching, because “a feeling in the body does not need to be understood.” It needs to be felt.

If the pain in your chest is sharp, sudden, or comes with breathlessness, please get it checked by a doctor. Heartbreak can hurt the body. Don’t let anyone, including you, assume that’s all it is.

How to get over heartbreak, when every trick only delays it

You’ve probably been given the list. Stay busy. Go out with the girls. Delete his number. Get back out there. Some of it helps for an evening.

But look at what those things have in common. They’re all ways of not being in the room with the ache. And the ache waits. It comes back on Sunday afternoon, or at 3 a.m., or when you see his car.

There’s a passage in our book about exactly this: “And when the relationship has been broken by betrayal, the mind wants revenge, or answers, or a new person to erase the old one. None of those touch the pain. The pain lives in your body, and it needs to be felt there, not analyzed.”

Getting over it doesn’t mean getting away from it. It means letting it hurt fully, for a few minutes at a time, instead of leaving it to ache in the background, waiting.

When you lost yourself before you lost him

Sometimes the heartbreak is double. You lost the person, and you realize you’d been losing yourself for a long time before that.

So many people come to our sessions with a version of the same sentence: “At first it feels like love. Then little by little, I disappear.” You said it’s fine when it wasn’t. You became easier, quieter, more convenient. And now that he’s gone, you’re not sure who’s left.

If that’s you, there’s grief in two directions. For him, and for the woman you put on hold. Both are allowed. Neither needs to be fixed tonight.

A five-minute practice for the ache in your chest

You’ve been spending so much effort not feeling this. Holding it together at work. Smiling at your sister. Not crying in the car. This practice asks you to spend that same effort the other way, for five minutes.

Lie down or sit somewhere nobody will need you. Close your eyes, or cover them. Let your arms rest by your sides, palms down, and leave your breath alone. Then go to the place in your chest that aches most.

Practice5 min

Let the chest hurt fully

  1. Put all of your attention there, and keep it there. You are not trying to change it. You are not waiting for it to leave.
  2. Five minutes of letting the chest hurt fully. The effort you spend on not feeling, spend on feeling.
  3. Don’t follow the thoughts. Let them pass like cars on a street. No blame. Just come back.
  4. Don’t run. If you can, stay one more minute.

What you might notice: the ache might grow before it changes. It may climb into your throat. Tears may come in waves, or not at all. You might feel a quiet tiredness afterwards. All of it is fine, and you can stop the moment you need to.

If you’ve been through something very heavy and the hurt is still raw, go in small doses. A few minutes, then stop. Come back another day.

If those five minutes gave the ache somewhere to go, even for a moment, the book walks you the rest of the way: how to stay with a feeling like this from start to finish, and what to do when it comes back on a Sunday afternoon.

Getting through the evenings after he’s gone

  • Don’t text him tonight. Not the angry one, not the sweet one. “First the feeling, then the decision. Answers come from calm, never from the middle of a wave.”
  • Put his photos away for one evening, not forever. Notice what rises in your chest when you do.
  • Call one person who loves you. Heartbreak is heavy to carry alone. Being with the feeling doesn’t mean being by yourself with it.
  • When a song or a street ambushes you, stop for ten seconds. Find where it hit in your body. Change nothing. Then carry on.
  • Let tomorrow be ordinary. One small thing that’s only for you, before you check your phone.

If the tears are stuck behind the ache, read I want to cry but I can’t. If the weight in your chest feels more like sadness than heartbreak, we wrote about the heavy feeling in chest from sadness. If the hurt is turning bitter, see how to let go of resentment. And for the nights that are hardest, how to stop feeling lonely at night. Under states we’ve written about the long, heavy states a breakup can leave behind, and the whole method lives in the Feeling Session.

There’s a picture we love for this: you want something new, and you’re still carrying the bag from the last one. You don’t have to throw the bag away tonight. You can just set it down on the floor next to you, open it, and feel what’s inside.

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