Being in love is an essential aspect of life. All humans need to feel connected to other humans somehow, and love is a universal way to connect with others. When you fall in love with someone, and they love you in return, you’re able to build a long-term relationship that fulfills both of your lives in so many ways. When such a long-term relationship ends, it can be devastating to both parties, no matter the circumstances of how the relationship ended. When you mourn the loss of a long-term relationship, you mourn the loss of years dedicated to the relationship. You are grieving the sacrifice of future hopes and dreams. It is essential that when you’ve lost someone you care about in such a way, you take time to grieve that loss. However, there are ways to be happy again after experiencing a loss.
The end of a long-term relationship is painful. Of course, it affects our mental health, but it can also impact our bodies. Stress from a breakup can cause skin blemishes, sore and achy muscles, loss of appetite, and problems sleeping, to name a few effects. If you feel your pain both emotionally and physically, don’t try to convince yourself “it is all in your head.” Because it isn’t and learning how to be happy again means accepting your pain, feeling it, then moving on from it.
Psychologists indicate that the end of a marriage or long-term relationship can feel as painful as death to the person left behind. So following a lot of the same steps as grieving the death of a loved one can help you when you need to get over being rejected by your significant other. Humiliation is also a vital factor for the person who was left behind. They have to deal with the stigma of being the one that wasn’t wanted, and that can exacerbate the feelings of loss and pain, making it harder to heal and slowing down the progress on how to be happy again.
How To Be Happy Again
Take The Time You Need For Soul Searching
It might be tempting to rush past the recovery and grieving stage, but you won’t do yourself or any future potential mates any favors by running past the recovery stage. How can you learn to be happy again? You must slow down and take stock of where you are first. It would help if you took inventory of your current feelings, soul search to find out where you need to make changes to start feeling better and make some progress before you try to move on. Your mental health will only suffer if you don’t take the time to heal before you move on.
You also don’t want to carry any baggage into your future relationships. If you don’t take your time to figure out how to be happy again, you might never get there. That timeline is different for each person, so let it happen naturally and don’t try to rush it.
Rely On Your Support System
Your family will be vital to helping your find how to be happy again after the end of a long-term relationship. They know you better than most people, and they will know how much you cared for the person you have lost. Supportive family members will know not to drag your ex through the mud but will let you vent as you need to purge the anger from your heart. They can give you advice on being happy again in healthy and stable ways because they love you and want you to have a love-filled life.
Friends will also play a key role in finding how to be happy again. Friends are often close to you in age and have led a similar life, so chances are they’ve had a long-term relationship end and should have some sage advice. Even if they haven’t had such a loss, they care for you and want to see you find your happiness again, so lean on them as often as you feel you can. They will gladly help bear your burden while you figure out how to be happy again.
After a bit of time, you should try to connect with new people. Making new friends will open up new ways to spend your time and give you new perspectives on how to be happy again. They will bring views from people outside your prior family and friends circle, and fresh eyes can often give a fresh perspective on how to be happy again. Plus, it will be healing to flex the muscles of getting to know new people through friendships before you consider entering new relationships again in the future.
If you have children, be sure to rely on them while providing them the support they need. They will benefit as much as you will from having open conversations about pain without blame and anger. You can set a good example for them by actively finding how to be happy again and not letting yourself become entirely broken by losing this long-term relationship.
Limit Your Interactions With Your Ex
When you need to find how to be happy again after a bad breakup, it can set you back to be seeing or interacting with your ex continually. If you don’t share children and you can navigate the murky waters of maintaining friendships with mutual friends, it might even be best to cut them out of your life as completely as possible. Unfollow them on social media, let your friends and family know how much information you want to share with them, and make them respect that boundary. The last thing you need is to start feeling better and then find out your ex has moved on and is already in another relationship. That will cause doubt to creep back in, and you’ll begin to wonder what she has that you do not have. Not a healthy thought pattern for someone trying to find how to be happy again, as it will only drag you down.
Make Time For Yourself a Priority
Prioritizing yourself during this time will be the primary driver in finding how to be happy again. Establish new routines so that your days are not filled with time voids that used to be taken up by time with your ex. Listen to your body and your mind and when either tell you to rest, do it. Take up new hobbies, or even change up your career if you’ve wanted to so that the excitement of the unknown helps temper the sadness of what once was. Continue to work on your soul searching and learning as much as you can about yourself. How you process grief will give you the confidence to take with you as you chart a new course in life.
Invest in Your Mental Health
You can find how to be happy again by talking about your feelings with family and friends. You can seek professional help if your support system lacks or needs more help getting there. If you have thoughts of harming yourself or someone else at any time, call for professional help.
Give time and attention to your sadness and your anger. Feelings can only be overcome by letting them happen. If you try to bury them, they will bubble up again later, which will only cause more problems for you and could ruin a possible future relationship. Negative thoughts fester inside you, and when they pop out again, they are stronger and meaner and much harder to control than they are when they first manifest.
Ponder what went wrong in the relationship and accept blame where it is due, but remember it takes two to tango, and you couldn’t possibly have been the entire reason this relationship didn’t work out. Try to be fair while assessing who did what, blame your ex and blame yourself, but then forgive yourself and them so that you can both learn how to be happy again.
Invest In Your Physical Health
The mental and physical are so intricately intertwined in humans. You will be much quicker to find how to be happy again if you concentrate on your physical health alongside your work on your mental health. Please pay attention to the food you eat and make sure it nourishes your body. Be sure you are getting enough food to fuel it to function correctly. If you are not already exercising regularly, add an exercise routine to your day. Exercise releases endorphins and clears your mind for problem-solving, which you can leverage in discovering how to be happy again.
Be careful with drugs and alcohol. When you experience a loss, it can be tempting to numb the pain with booze. Alcohol can help you relax in the short term, but if you rely on it too often or imbibe a bit too much, you can make the path to how to be happy again a much longer and harder road to travel.
Regain Your Strength and Confidence
Doing something you are good at can go far in helping rebuild your confidence in yourself. Find something challenging but possible and give it all you have. When you succeed, take pride in your accomplishments and use that energy toward how to be happy again.
Focus on your worthy attributes. Embrace your strengths and gain strength from them, and work on your areas of weakness. This is another area where that soul searching and ponderance of what went wrong in your relationship is vital. Failure is indeed a failure if you don’t learn from it and apply it when you try again. Turning what you did wrong in your prior relationship into a way to strengthen a new relationship is another step in how to be happy again.
Cut Yourself Some Slack
Expecting that you will not be on your A-game for some time after the end of a long-term relationship will help ease your burden. It allows you the time and energy to focus on finding how to be happy again without constantly feeling like you’re spread too thin. Withdrawing from activities that don’t impact your career and your family directly gives you time to process your grief properly without as much guilt.
Set expectations with your loved ones that you might not be as pleasant as you had been in the past. Although spending time with loved ones is a great way to help heal a broken heart, you might not be ready to go to large gatherings or out into crowded public areas. Those places can be overwhelming, and keeping things as easy and manageable as possible will set you up for success in how to be happy again.
Embrace and Celebrate Being Single
Being single isn’t the end of the world, despite feeling that way when your long-term relationship first ends. Start making a list of all the good things you have to look forward to as a single person. Perhaps how to be happy again is to look forward to renovating the living room which you’ve always hated, but your ex loved. Or maybe how to be happy again is to let them keep the home you shared, and you get to find a fantastic new place to live. You’ll get to pick out a place that suits you and only you and fill it with the furniture and items of your choosing.
An essential aspect of how to be happy again is being ok with the idea of putting yourself first for a change. Everyone makes sacrifices to sustain their partner in a long-term relationship, but women often make drastic sacrifices. Your dreams take center stage now, and nothing is slowing you down from pursuing them as you find how to be happy again.
You can watch whatever you want on Netflix when you want to watch it—no more waiting until you’re both free to watch that next episode of your favorite shows. If you’re going to binge-watch an entire season on a Tuesday night while eating microwaved tuna fish casserole in your underwear, you can do that now. If controlling the Netflix streaming isn’t how to be happy again, what even is?
The entire bed is yours now. Maybe you like sleeping on the right side of the bed, but your ex was adamant they could never sleep on the left side. Sleep on the right side. Wrap all the covers around yourself like you’re a burrito. Turn the thermostat way up and sleep without blankets in the nude. The point here is that taking control of something as seemingly minor as how you sleep can help you learn to be happy again.
Trust In Your Ability to Survive
You were not always in this long-term relationship. Remind yourself that you survived and possibly even thrived as a single person before your ex came along. Although your ex brought you a lot of happiness at one point, no one person can be the sole source of someone else’s happiness. You’re perfectly capable of finding a way to thrive again as a single person once you decide how to be happy again in your own way.
Start Dating Again On Your Terms
No magical number applies when you try to figure out how long you should wait before dating again. And dating is not the magic key to how to be happy again. New relationships aren’t the key to how to be happy again, either.
You should most definitely not rush yourself. Dating is hard enough without feeling like you shouldn’t even be doing it, to begin with. Make sure you’ve worked through your grief and made positive steps toward living happily as a single person before you start looking for new potential mates.
If you’re thriving in your role as a single person and you’ve found how to be happy again after the loss, then don’t rush yourself out of that situation just because other people think you should start dating again. Their idea of the right time to date again is only suitable for their dating life. You set the rules for your own life, and you get to decide when it is the right time.
Romantic relationships are fulfilling. It means taking risks and opening yourself up to being hurt again, but it might also lead to the best relationship of your life—one full of mutual respect, passionate love, and the tightest of friendship bonds. Creating and maintaining strong relationships is how to be happy again once you’re ready.
How To Be Happy Again And Have It Look Good On You
Coming out of a long-term relationship can change you. Just as you changed and grew during that relationship, you can’t possibly expect to be the same person you were when it ended when you come out the other side of the grief.
To be happy again is to accept and even embrace change in yourself. To be happy again is to create new bonds with people and strengthen the bonds you have. How to be happy again is learning from your mistakes, accepting that you can’t control everyone and everything, and then letting go of the pain of the past. How to be happy again is to wear your newfound confidence with pride. And how to be happy again is to realize that you had all the keys to happiness within you all that time; they were hiding behind the sadness.
