How to fall out of love with someone: 4 scientific tricks

Love has always been defined as something we can't 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 we should stop feeling that kind of affection for someone, that is an option that is beyond our odds. Despite this, there are certain habits and behaviors that make it more likely that we will end up falling out of love with someone.

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When falling out of love is the best option

As crude as it sounds, losing 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 get out of 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 certain memories and analyze them, but we don't have the total power to make them go away, and we can't avoid being jumped by surprise from time to time: that's part of the normal functioning of our brain.

However, that 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, love disappointments and broken hearts.

So, how to take action on the matter? Saying we want to fall out of love is easier than doing it, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. make this type of feeling weaken in favor of our well-being and autonomy staff. Below you can read some keys to achieve it.

1. Regulates physical and eye contact

Looking into each other's eyes and touching each other are two situations: both cause our body to trigger the oxytocin production, a hormone related to affection and the establishment of trust bonds. In turn, a greater amount of oxytocin in our blood and in the spaces through which it is communicate the neurons of our brain make the emotions and behaviors related to the love. In fact, this happens even 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 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 during a good part of the day, to reverse this dynamic is good not to expose ourselves to situations in which we have to think about it by force because we have it in front of.

In many ways, love works like a drug, since both when 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 again. 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.

3. Return to routines that make us independent

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 her, 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 The only missing piece of the puzzle is the presence of that person, and this incongruity will give us issues. On the other hand, if we make the departure of 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 phase of transition.

In addition, inventing new ways of living from day to day will make it more possible for us to consider activities that have little to do with the life of a lover, with which the chances of thinking about the person we felt something for decrease: simply, the references to it will be scarcer.

In short, in the style of what behaviorist psychologists proposed as b. F. skinner, if we want to make our life change we can take into account that the most important thing is to make the environment change and the activities we are often exposed to, rather than trying to change ourselves without moving a muscle.

4. work on self esteem

Sometimes, the failure of the relationship project with someone is a severe blow to self-esteem. That is why to the previous behavior guidelines we must add a constant evaluation of our self-image and self-esteem. If not, it is easy that, feeling invalid as people, we desperately seek to be with the other person again, to better accept ourselves.

For this, it is necessary to try to make an analysis as cold and distanced as possible from who we are, what we do and what defines us, taking into account the events we have experienced. In other words, it is not about thinking of ourselves as entities independent of our environment: what What matters is to realize how we behave with the means we have and depending on our objectives and interests.

managing care

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 attentional focus makes us concentrate on those things that are really necessary or useful to us and, therefore, helps us get away from the rumination, that process similar to a vicious circle by which almost everything we do or perceive reminds us of what makes us feel bad: how we we feel sad, we think about what causes that, and as we think about what causes that, we feel sad.

Thus, the key is to intervene both in our thoughts and in our actions to break this seemingly infinite loop of comparisons and sadness. Begin to impose 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 we fell in love with one day. And, of course, if we believe that the problem is so severe that it totally interferes with our quality of life, it is worth considering whether go to psychotherapy sessions. In any case, the engine of change must always be ourselves.