How long does it take to get over a break up?

The end of a love relationship is not only emotionally painful; In addition, they make us have a feeling of loss of control over our lives. For this reason, it is normal for those who are going through these experiences to ask themselves a question that practically all those who suffer from heartbreak ask themselves: How long does it take to get over a breakup?

In the following lines we will see what is known about the duration of this psychological recovery process.

How long does it take to get over the break up?

No psychological change occurs overnight, neither in theory nor in practice. Simply trying to force yourself to stop feeling bad immediately is ineffective at best and harmful at worst.

In the case of a couple breaking up, this is very clear. The love story that has been lived together with another person leaves a very powerful emotional imprint that it does not have to disappear just when it suits us, as if it were a computer file. Our brains don't work according to our wishes, because they have been there long before we began to think about the emotions we feel.

So that, time is a key element when it comes to overcoming a love breakup; Whether we like it or not, we need this ingredient to feel better when we realize that one of these chapters of our lives is closing. And how long does that period last?

According to research carried out by University College London and Binghamton University and whose results have been published in the journal Evolutionary Behavioral SciencesIn most cases, it takes between six months and two years for people to consider themselves over a breakup. However, there are many factors that seem to influence the time needed, and the sex of the person is one of them.

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Women recover sooner after heartbreak

As reflected by the data collected from this research, based on questionnaires administered to more than 5,000 people from 96 countries, women suffer more intensely than men when the rupture has recently occurred, but they also recover before the latter. In fact, from what has been seen, it is relatively common for men to start another relationship without having fully overcome a previous breakup.

A possible explanation for this difference between women and men is the following: they tend to invest more in each relationship, since their Well-being is more compromised due to the possibility of being mothers and the cultural pressure associated with the female gender role, while men men They tend to assume that they should adopt a competitive mindset in love.. This would cause many women to suffer a breakup more punctually, while men would always carry the pressure of having to attract the attention of a potential partner.

The importance of resilience

It is true that time is an important factor when it comes to overcoming a breakup, but it is also true that each person has a different way of dealing with adversity. This ability to take the blows (metaphorically speaking) that life gives us is what is known as resilience.

Although it may seem strange, there are those who almost totally lack resilience. It's not that they're people who don't want to push themselves out of those kinds of potholes; precisely, when things are worse for us it is very easy for us to lose control of our attitudes and our habits, and as a consequence, there are those who, when going through a bad moment, feel totally incapable of doing anything other than trying to resign themselves, or even fantasize about their own miseries.

It is quite possible that resilience has a genetic component in part, such that different people have different degrees of ease or difficulty to overcome, but there is no doubt that the environmental and learned aspect is essential. For this reason, internalizing a series of skills can make the time necessary to get over a break up shortened. shorten, improving our resilience, but it may also be that voluntary or unwittingly unnecessarily lengthen this period of suffering.

For this reason, some people will need to go to psychological therapy to have a kind of "emotional training"; others will only need the support of family and friends, etc. The important thing is to be clear that resilience, whether applied to heartbreak or to any other aspect of life, is something individual, and that research focused on The time it takes to recover psychologically after a breakup is a general trend, a fruit of statistics and not of the functioning of one's brain. same. In emotions there are no clear rules that no one can exceed; each must explore that ever mysterious jungle that is her own mind.

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