Love is a beautiful, complicated thing. True love with another should empower you in new ways as you reach deep levels of connection, understanding, and empathy with another person. But, as we all know, it’s not that easy. 

Particularly after a breakup, it’s easy to be confused. Odds are things didn’t end with you being madly engaged and in love with your former significant other. Your mind is spinning, trying to figure out what the next phase of your relationship life will bring and it’s easy to look for love in the wrong places.

Back in 2001, Neil Strauss introduced a controversial book that detailed the inner workings of the “pickup subculture.” It told the story of fraternity-esque mansions where guys would go to learn the art of hooking up with women.

Negging, magic tricks, peacocking were just a few of the tactics employed to reduce a woman to a level to where she would be primed to pick up and take home. It served as a bible for thousands of guys who always had trouble winning over women.

Solitude frequently carries negative connotations of sadness and loneliness due to a lack of companions. I want to debunk that perception, because when perfected, solitude can be one of the more powerful methods for achieving deep introspection, self-love, and exponential personal growth.

Society is overwhelming. Think about a typical walk down a busy street in Manhattan. Within a span of 3 minutes, you’re probably exposed to hundreds of people, dozens of advertising messages, an inundation of traffic noises, and at least three or four smells that you probably don’t want to know the originating source.

The first few weeks after breaking up with a significant other are critical in determining what your path will be for the next several months. After every breakup I’ve been through, the one factor that remained constant for me was simple. Get Huge.  

This mantra refers to hitting the gym and challenging your body to become as strong as possible. Junior year after a breakup, I took my scrawny ass into the Vandy rec center and picked up where I left off training for baseball in high school and started “blessing the iron” as the Rock refers to crushing a workout.

Toxic is certainly a buzzword that’s blazing through conversations surrounding health and wellness these days. They could be in your mattress or your non-organic fruit. Maybe toxins are lurking in your shampoo and you never even thought of it. So much thought and energy now goes into identifying and eliminating sources of toxicity to prevent it from entering your body.

What about toxins that enter your soul? Toxic people can have an arguably far worse impact on your overall being. They bring you down, inhibit your growth, and force you to be a lesser version of yourself. It’s important to identify potentially toxic friendships in your life and especially not engage in a more significant relationship that might have those same qualities.

As humans, we’re genetically engineered to be negative. This dates back eons to times when our prehistoric ancestors had to keep their head on a swivel to see if there was some type of massive predator lurking in the bushes. Anything that was brought into your field of view was first analyzed for threats. Or in the nomenclature of Mac from Always Sunny, the full “Ocular Patdown.”

Fast forward many thousands of years and this negativity bias remains naturally in our DNA. The lens that you view the world through is meant to analyze potential threats. In doing so, it clouds your mind with more negativity. This is amplified even more so when it comes to getting over a breakup. The sky is falling, world is ending, doomsday type thoughts take over and everything in your world is negative.

Sucks, right? The good news is that you can absolutely change the way that your brain works and processes information to a more positive inclination. Through repetition, you can rework your neurons to fire in new ways.