Healing a broken heart is hard enough; adjusting to an empty bed every night might just be the icing on the cake. This expert advice will explain to you why bedtime is so difficult post-breakup and how to get through even the coldest and loneliest of nights.
“I dreaded going to bed every day,” a fatigued Michael Baker told me. But his situation was ordinary, at least at first. It is an everyday occurrence for two people to break up, an event tightly woven into our humanity and experienced by almost every face you pass on the street. As bittersweet as it may be, people change, and lives move on. When Michael’s partner decided to call it quits, he knew he could do nothing. He never could have imagined that it would be the very thing that has kept him up every night for the last 2 months.
“Before, I didn’t have any problems falling asleep for the most part,” admits the 32-year-old from Denver, Colorado. However, as nighttime rolled around, the light in the office was getting bluer and the streets quieting to a hum, his bed became the loneliest place on earth.
“Ultimately,” Michael reflects, “as soon as the breakup happened, it caused intense sleeping issues. I would fall asleep normally and then randomly at anywhere between 3:30–5 am, I would wake up basically panicking, overthinking, thinking about what I did, thinking about them.” This would make it very difficult for him to fall asleep again. “Then I have to get up for work and go about my day.”
He was now dealing with a case of full-blown insomnia, but why does this happen? Even if it isn’t insomnia, why do those first few sleeps after our breakup, with no distractions, feel so unbearable? Like taking our clawing hands from the side of an ice rink and plunging into the middle. Flailing arms, Bambi legs and all.
Relationship specialist Angela Amias seems to echo Michael’s situation, talking about the impact of heartbreak when waking up to that all too quiet middle of the night.
“They’re asking themselves, why did I do this or why did I ignore these problems. Why did I say that thing to her that caused her to decide she didn’t want to be with me.
“Once people get into that kind of train of thought then it’s difficult to fall back to sleep. You could be awake for hours at night, even if you were able to originally fall asleep.
“It’s like being jolted awake and then just thinking about how you might have prevented this from happening.”
The truth is, breakups are an avalanche of thoughts, especially when we’re trying to do the thing that requires total thoughtlessness.
“Sleep is the number one complaint after a breakup.”
Tasha Jackson, creator of a TEDx talk on dealing with breakups, explains this better than I could:
“We are meant to be connected to people,” she says, “we are meant to have attachments. A breakup is the opposite of that. We are detaching. We’re meant to be in tribes and be with people if we’re out hunting and gathering. That keeps us safe, and now we’re in this place where it’s not. So, at a time when you want to feel safe and go to sleep, you’re then thinking about something that puts you into an alert state.”
Of course, detachment is a lot about losing the intimacy of sharing a bed with someone. Social media is abundant with individuals reaching out to share their breakup aches and pains, and Asena and her 123k followers are no exception to that. Asena, whose relationship ended after five and a half years of joint living, felt the physical absence strongly.
“This is actually so funny,” she laughed, “but whenever I couldn’t sleep, for example, I would hold my ex’s hand.”
After her breakup, she began holding her own and thinking, “It’s fine, I’m fine.”
In some of her TikToks she self-comforts by hugging herself, “I got so used to doing this that now if something good happens I immediately hug myself.”
“So, I guess coming back to myself helped so much. I’m always thinking that I’m alone, but it’s okay because I got myself, and then at some point I wasn’t crying myself to sleep.”
Asena was experiencing not only the mental strain of a breakup, but a whole physical routine change.
“For people who used to sleep with their partner, so much of the calm and the sense of safety associated with falling asleep is then gone because the whole ritual is different,” says Amias.
“Therefore, even to the body, it feels like an unsafe experience to try to relax into this very different kind of sleep environment.”
“I think the other piece of advice is just normalising that this is difficult. This is a grieving process, and your body is very involved in that grieving process. It’s not uncommon to have difficulty sleeping for a while. It’s not going to last forever.”
The physical effects a breakup has on your body come back to the very thing that’s breaking – your heart. Tiffany Field, a PhD and author of a paper on sleep disorders, explains, “The extreme of having an increased heart rate is called takotsubo.” This is based on the name of a pot used in Japan to catch octopus.
“The reason it’s called that is because the left ventricle of the heart takes on the shape of takotsubo, of that octopus pot, which is an abnormal shape.”
She explains that if you were to go to hospital with these symptoms, the pattern profile would be the same as having a real heart attack.
“Fortunately,” she reassures, “there’s no long-term effects of getting takotsubo — or as other people call it — broken heart syndrome. It doesn’t cause any damage like a heart attack does.”
“But that’s how extreme it can get if you have heartbreak. Your heart is being zapped.”
“I talked about this in my TEDx talk,” adds Jackson, “initially when we have the first few days and weeks, you can literally feel your body and the pain. So, I think for a lot of people, just the physical symptoms and how they play out for everybody in sleep — lack of energy, headaches — those can be some of the hardest stuff we physically go through.”
Insomnia can also result from the production of cortisol. Cortisol, more commonly known as the ‘stress hormone,’ does what it says on the tin — we must destress.
“Exercise has much the same effect as being touched,” Tiffany says. It increases the stimulation of pressure receptors under the skin, and that slows down the release of cortisol. ” Therefore, she suggests exercising before bed. “Then you can get rid of that insomnia and sleep.”
“After nearly a month, this sleep pattern kept happening and would make me so
tired and awfully fatigued during the day,” Michael recalled. “This is where I realised my body has been forming this habit. It has continued for two months straight to this day.”
Our bodies are masters of forming habits.
Jackson says, “You can’t force your body to sleep,” but setting a pattern as much as possible is the only solution. “It’s setting yourself up for the best possible thing.”
“Creating content, everyone tells me, ‘it’s been two years. I still haven’t healed.’ Because they’re not focusing on healing, they’re focusing on the pain. And if you’re focusing on the pain, you will be in pain,” says Asena.
“So, with the sleep too, if you are convincing yourself into thinking ‘I can’t sleep,’ you won’t be able to sleep. You need to build healthy habits and new routines and fall in love with your new life so that the old one slowly disappears. It’s not going to disappear one day.”
Amias brings it right back to the building blocks of sleep.
“Think the sight of new sheets, for example,” she says, “obviously those new sheets are going to smell differently, and I think that people have to find a way to create that new sleeping ritual.”
“If we don’t leave time during the day to process the breakup and work through the feelings, then it’s going to happen at some point,” Jackson says.
Allowing yourself to feel alone at other points that aren’t bedtime may make that space feel less consuming.
Asena comments, “Don’t avoid the feelings because if you do and you’re with friends, then you’re avoiding sleeping because you know you’re going to bed alone.”
For her, learning to reclaim sleep became a huge part of healing.
“I never feel like, my god, I’m going to bed alone. I’m so excited to sleep now that I am so comfortable being alone. I can’t wait to go home and sleep. I can’t wait to be alone intentionally.”
So, when you’re lying there, manning your solo sleep ship sailing across a sea of couples, try to remember how good it feels to have a space just of your own. The one constant in your bed will always be you.
“I can’t wait to be alone intentionally.”
— Angela Amias, Relationship Specialist
Tashi’s Story
Behavioural scientist and content creator, Tashi, finds remedies to a broken heart. (withlovetashi)
“At the beginning of the breakup, I usually just let myself feel fully distracted. I have to go to the gym. But I also allow myself to take a break even if I know I won’t be that productive. I allow myself to binge-watch TV or TikTok. What made me feel a lot better during the heartbreak was watching so much Sex and the City and Gossip Girl because they’re breaking up all the time, so I was like, surely, it’s fine! But it’s easy to busy yourself during the day. In the evening, I’d say, when I would finally face that kind of quietness, it would feel intolerable.
“Fully claim the ownership of your space. Take responsibility for setting this as your sanctuary. For example, if you have a double bed, make sure that you sleep in the middle.
“The first thing about insomnia and sleeping with heartbreak is patience, but I think the second biggest thing is this trick that I invented for myself. I’m a big believer that everything always happens for a reason. I think even if it doesn’t, it just gives you hope and it’s beautiful to find coincidences in your life. It’s just kind of a philosophy that I live by, because I know that it did happen. One door closes for the other one to open.
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