22 Things To Do When You’re Heartbroken

1. Think about your favorite memory from when you were a kid, and ask someone else who knew you at that time — whether family or friends — to tell you about what you were like when you were little.

2. Make yourself a hot chocolate with special flavors and spices, like white chocolate raspberry or milk chocolate cinnamon.

3. Write an actual list of all your favorite things about your everyday life, from the neighborhood your apartment it is in to the dogs people leave tied up outside your favorite coffee shop that you can pet if their owners say it’s okay.

4. Put on a YouTube video of yoga for beginners and give it a try. If nothing else, enjoy being calm and just focusing on breathing and stretching for a few minutes.

5. Get yourself all dressed up and styled nicely to go on a basic errand and realize how much better you feel just from putting in the effort for yourself and making your appearance reflect someone who is happy and confident.

6. Smile at people you pass and watch them smile back.

7. Go to your local Sephora or other body and cosmetics store and ask one of the salespeople what they would recommend for you on whatever budget you’ve set for yourself. If you have a skin problem you want to work on or a feature you want to enhance, tell them about it and let them try a few samples on you before you pick what you want to buy.

8. Watch one of your old favorite feel good movies, like Now and Then or First Wives Club. And yes, you have to sing along with the songs in them.

9. Set yourself up with an OkCupid profile, if only just to remind yourself that there are other people out there who are interested in you, or that you find attractive, or with whom there could be an entirely new story that you have yet to read the first page of. (Also to laugh at the fedoras who complain about sluts friendzoning them in their profiles, if you are in the mood for some comedy.)

10. Get involved in a really complex, demanding TV series that you’ve never seen before. Pick something with multiple seasons to watch and tons of stories to follow and get lost in — particularly stories that don’t revolve exclusively around romance and dating. Think Breaking Bad, The Wire, or Boardwalk Empire.

11. Re-read all of the Harry Potter books.

12. Have some of your good friends over for a slumber party complete with board games, movies you love, junk food, and champagne (Andre will absolutely do in a pinch). Make sure that they are friends who wouldn’t judge you if you cried, but would more likely than not make you laugh.

13. Go for a long run with one of your favorite podcasts in your headphones, letting yourself get lost in whatever they’re talking about. Alternate between walking and jogging/running so you can sustain yourself for a long period of time, and try not to come back home until the podcast is over.

14. Go to an aquarium or zoo for a long time on a weekend afternoon and spend a long time looking at each animal and actually reading their little informational plaques that most of us just ignore. If there’s a petting section where you can feed some of them, all the better.

15. Sleep with your head on the wrong end of the bed and realize how oddly different everything seems.

16. Start keeping detailed journals of the dreams your having, and re-reading them every week or so. Note when you see patterns or things you recognize from your real life and try to think about what they might mean.

17. Watch a movie that you know will make you cry — cry for reasons other than romantic love — and allow it to make you sob. Weep over the movie until you feel like you’re all cried out, completely emptied of tears, and realize that you can’t cry for your heartbreak anymore, at least for that moment. (For this, I recommend the last 30 minutes of Beasts of the Southern Wild.

18. Sit down with a friend or family member you trust more than anyone and tell them the whole story, beginning to end, even the parts that are incredibly unflattering to you.

19. Buy really nice, pretty underwear. Everyone knows you automatically feel infinitely better going throughout your day knowing you’re wearing awesome underwear underneath. It doesn’t matter if no one else is going to see it — that’s not the point. You do it for yourself.

20. Leave a really nice tip for your favorite baristas and know that you just made their day.

21. Get a trial pass for a fancy gym in your area and go to the spa/sauna section for a few hours to just sweat everything out like an enormous lump of fleshy emotions.

22. Give someone a big hug — not one of those lame hover hugs that straight bros do because they’re afraid if they accidentally bump penises through their jeans they’ll be gay forever. A real hug. Like you mean it.