Insights into the Mind

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Breakups do not arrive in isolation. They land right in the middle of everything else — the job stress, the family tension, the low-grade grief you were already carrying before the relationship even ended. If you are coping with a breakup during difficult times, when life was already asking too much of you, I want you to know that the weight you are feeling right now is real. It is not weakness. It is accumulation.

Why Breakups Hit Harder When Life Is Already Heavy

Something I have noticed, both in my own life and in a lot of the research I read, is that we tend to underestimate how much context shapes our emotional experience. A breakup that might have felt manageable at another time of life can feel genuinely destabilising when your nervous system is already stretched. And that is not a sign of emotional fragility — it is just biology.

When we are under chronic stress, our bodies are already producing higher levels of cortisol. Add the acute grief of a relationship ending — the loss of a person, a routine, a future you had imagined — and the emotional system simply has fewer resources to cope. Research published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology has found that social rejection activates some of the same neural pathways as physical pain. So when people say a breakup is painful, they mean it quite literally.

I remember being in my mid-twenties, already in the thick of undiagnosed anxiety and struggling with panic attacks I did not yet have a name for, when a relationship ended. At the time I thought I was simply “bad at breakups.” Looking back, I was a person with an already overwhelmed nervous system experiencing a genuine loss. That reframe matters.

What Actually Helps: Practical Strategies That Are Not Just “Self-Care”

I have very little patience for the “bubble bath and journalling” approach to heartbreak when life is already hard. Not because those things are wrong, but because when you are genuinely struggling — financially, emotionally, professionally — you need something more grounded than candles and gratitude lists. Here is what I have found actually helps.

Triage Your Emotional Bandwidth

You do not have to process everything at once. When I was going through a particularly difficult period, a therapist I was seeing introduced me to the idea of “emotional triage” — essentially, identifying what needs immediate attention and what can wait. Acute grief needs space, but it does not need to be resolved in a week. Give yourself permission to feel things in stages rather than trying to move through the whole arc of heartbreak while simultaneously holding everything else together.

Reduce the Decisions You Have to Make

Decision fatigue is a very real phenomenon. Research from social psychology suggests our capacity for self-regulation depletes throughout the day, and grief compounds that significantly. In the early weeks of a breakup during an already stressful time, simplify wherever you can. Meal plan loosely, keep your schedule predictable, and say no to things that are optional. You are not being antisocial. You are protecting your limited resources.

Be Honest About What You Are Actually Mourning

Sometimes what we grieve is not the person themselves but the stability they represented. Especially if life is already chaotic, a relationship can function as an anchor. When that anchor goes, it can feel like everything is unmoored. Naming this honestly — “I miss feeling secure” rather than “I miss him specifically” — can help you understand what need is actually going unmet, and how else you might begin to meet it.

When the Relationship Itself Was Part of the Problem

Not every breakup is a straightforward loss. Sometimes the relationship you are mourning was also one that was costing you — emotionally, energetically, perhaps in ways that touched on patterns far older than the relationship itself. From my own experience and from conversations with readers over the years, I know that these breakups carry a particular kind of complexity. You can grieve something that was also harmful to you. Both things are true.

If the relationship involved patterns of people-pleasing, fear of abandonment, or difficulty maintaining your own sense of self, that is worth exploring — not as a way of blaming yourself, but as genuinely useful self-knowledge. A lot of us bring attachment wounds into our adult relationships without realising it, and a breakup can be an unexpected opportunity to look at those patterns with some honesty and compassion.

If this resonates with you, a few resources I think are genuinely helpful rather than gimmicky:

• The Codependency Recovery Workbook by Restoring Self-Worth and Self-Love takes a step-by-step approach to understanding fear of abandonment and people-pleasing, which often sit at the heart of difficult relationship endings.
• The Codependency Healing Workbook is particularly good if you want a more structured, trauma-informed framework for understanding why you relate the way you do.
• If you are also navigating family stress alongside the breakup — which many people are — Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members is a compassionate and practical read about maintaining your own boundaries when external relationships are also under strain.

These are not replacements for therapy, and I want to be clear about that. If you are struggling significantly, please do consider speaking to a qualified therapist or counsellor. In the UK, you can self-refer to NHS Talking Therapies, or look for an accredited therapist through the BACP directory. Workbooks can be a brilliant supplement, but they work best alongside human support.

Rebuilding Boundaries When You Are Running on Empty

One of the quieter challenges of a breakup during difficult times is that it often forces a renegotiation of your boundaries — with yourself, with mutual friends, with social media, and sometimes with family members who have strong opinions about what happened. When you are already depleted, the thought of asserting yourself can feel exhausting before you even begin.

Therapists often describe boundary-setting as a skill rather than a personality trait. That framing helped me enormously when I first came across it. It means it can be learned, practised, and improved — even when you are not feeling your strongest. A couple of books I return to on this topic are Set Boundaries, Find Peace by Nedra Tawwab, which is one of the most readable and practically grounded books on the subject I have encountered, and Boundaries by Cloud and Townsend, which offers a values-driven framework for understanding why limits matter in every relationship in your life.

Practically speaking, this might look like muting your ex on social media rather than agonising over a full block, being honest with friends about what kind of support you actually need, or simply telling family members that you are not ready to debrief yet. Small, specific boundaries protect your energy in ways that grand emotional declarations rarely do.

If you are also working through patterns from a codependent or enmeshed relationship, The Codependency Recovery Workbook by Lisa Walter has a really useful section on identifying where your boundaries became blurred and beginning to rebuild them from the inside out. And if family toxicity is part of the wider picture adding to your already-full plate, Setting Boundaries for Survival addresses exactly that intersection of reclaiming peace when multiple relationships are draining you at once.

Coping with a Breakup During Difficult Times: The Long View

Coping with a breakup during difficult times is not about finding a way to feel fine quickly. It is about finding a way to stay intact while you move through something genuinely hard — without the rest of your life collapsing around you in the process. That is a different, more honest goal. And it is achievable.

From my own experience, the things that helped most were not the grand healing gestures. They were the small stabilising ones: keeping one consistent routine, having one person I could be completely honest with, giving myself a genuine timeline of “you do not have to have processed this yet” rather than measuring my grief against some imaginary deadline.

You are not behind. You are not broken. You are a person carrying more than one hard thing at a time, and that is a genuinely difficult situation — not a character flaw.

If you are in the UK and need to talk to someone today, the Samaritans are available 24/7 on 116 123. For ongoing support, your GP can refer you to counselling, or you can explore the BACP’s therapist directory at bacp.co.uk.

Take good care of yourself. I mean that in the most practical, unglamorous sense possible — sleep when you can, eat something real, and be a little gentler with yourself than you think you deserve right now. You are doing better than you know.

With warmth,
Lucy x