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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI dreaded going to bed every day,\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBefore, I didn\u2019t have any problems falling asleep for the most part,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cUltimately,\u201d Michael reflects, \u201cas soon as the breakup happened, it caused intense sleeping issues. I would fall asleep normally and then randomly at anywhere between 3:30\u20135 am, I would wake up basically panicking, overthinking, thinking about what I did, thinking about them.\u201d This would make it very difficult for him to fall asleep again. \u201cThen I have to get up for work and go about my day.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was now dealing with a case of full-blown insomnia, but why does this happen? Even if it isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Relationship specialist Angela Amias seems to echo Michael\u2019s situation, talking about the impact of heartbreak when waking up to that all too quiet middle of the night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThey\u2019re 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\u2019t want to be with me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cOnce people get into that kind of train of thought then it\u2019s difficult to fall back to sleep. You could be awake for hours at night, even if you were able to originally fall asleep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s like being jolted awake and then just thinking about how you might have prevented this from happening.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The truth is, breakups are an avalanche of thoughts, especially when we\u2019re trying to do the thing that requires total thoughtlessness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSleep is the number one complaint after a breakup.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tasha Jackson, creator of a TEDx talk on dealing with breakups, explains this better than I could:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe are meant to be connected to people,\u201d she says, \u201cwe are meant to have attachments. A breakup is the opposite of that. We are detaching. We\u2019re meant to be in tribes and be with people if we\u2019re out hunting and gathering. That keeps us safe, and now we\u2019re in this place where it\u2019s not. So, at a time when you want to feel safe and go to sleep, you\u2019re then thinking about something that puts you into an alert state.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n