What Breakups ACTUALLY Do To Men

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

There is so much NFL on ESPN right now.

Monday Night Football, plus pregame and postgame. NFL Live, NFL Primetime. Everything you need to stay on top of every game, every week.

SPEAKER_2 (0:14)

Unbelievable.

SPEAKER_1 (0:16)

And now, NFL Network is on the ESPN app. More football, more coverage, more ways to watch. Football's on, all season long, on ESPN and streaming on the ESPN app.

SPEAKER_3 (0:30)

College football is back, so Hilton called on me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky.

Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day.

Alok Kanojia (1:03)

Hey chat, welcome to the Healthy GamerGG podcast. I'm Dr. Olu Kanodja, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer.

On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in.

If you ask the average woman, what do you lose when you get divorced? What they will say is, I lost a relationship. If you ask a man, what did they lose? They will say, I lost a life, right? This life is now gone. All right, chat, today we're going to talk about how to successfully navigate a breakup. So I've been meaning to make this video for a while because there's a lot of advice out there, and a lot of the advice, I got to just be honest with y'all, kind of like pisses me off. So here's an example. Fear doesn't stop death. Fear stops life.

SPEAKER_3 (1:59)

Fear doesn't stop the end of a relationship.

Alok Kanojia (2:02)

Fear stops the relationship. And like, this is great, right? Like, oh my God, like, fear is not the avoidance of death. It is the avoidance of life.

SPEAKER_3 (2:09)

Oh my God.

Alok Kanojia (2:10)

Fear isn't what saves a relationship. Fear is what destroys a relationship. And so the first thing that I kind of noticed when I was like looking at dating advice or breakup advice on the internet is that what determines the advice that you see has nothing to do with outcomes. It has everything to do with the emotional state of the person who has recently broken up. So if I've been dumped, which video am I likely to click on? Which video empathically resonates with me? Because when I hear statements like this, like, there's some value to it, right? Like, absolutely. Fear does prevent us from doing certain things in life that are good for us. Like, that's like, actually, like, obviously. But also, if I'm afraid that my boyfriend or girlfriend's bestie at work, who happens to be the gender that they're attracted to, their work husband or their work wife, if I'm afraid of their relationship, that fear can be very helpful in saving the relationship. If I'm going on a date with someone who's kind of a creep and is like, Hey, do you want to come back to my place? I have a really great meal prepared for you.

SPEAKER_3 (3:13)

Please come back.

Alok Kanojia (3:14)

Don't go. Fear in that situation doesn't prevent life, it prevents death. Which is the basic problem with a lot of the dating advice out there, right? And everyone is sure that this is what you should do after a breakup. And the key thing is if you're seeing it on the internet, what's determining that is the level of emotional engagement with the post. So a great example of this is a lot of people will say, it's number one rule after a breakup, no contact, just go no contact, bro, no contact, avoid them, get rid of all the reminders. So here's a channel which I think has pretty good information about it. And this is what I find a little bit honestly frustrating. I'm a psychiatrist. And the problem is like when I'm trying to help people through a breakup, they're like real people in real lives. And something like going no contact simply is not a luxury for like 45 to 50% of people. You have a shared friend group, you are married and have kids. And then how are you supposed to go no contact and delete everything and block them if you're sharing children? And so in my journey to help the people in my office, what I sort of dug into and what I found is ultimately like the way to get over breakups. And this is a concept called equifinality. So this is this concept which we'll kind of go over. This is this concept that you can use a lot of different strategies and you can use strategies like avoidance, actually emotional avoidance. A lot of people will tell you things like feel your feelings. Actually, you don't need to do that. A lot of people will employ problem-focused coping. So this is where like we're not just going to journal and talk about our feelings and things like that. We're actually going to and this is a lot of advice on the internet. Like just just go lift, bro. Like put yourself together, go lift, hit the gym, start putting your life together, like fix your car, fix your house, start cooking, get into shape. Like people will offer this advice. And then there's a lot of advice around feeling your feelings. You should grieve, you should grieve this way, like grieve and accept. But then the other problem is that feeling your feelings can sometimes become damaging. So if you allow yourself to feel your sadness, what a lot of people will discover is that their sadness will run away from them. So I'll give you guys a simple example. So people will say, okay, grief is about like accepting, right, that this is over. You have to feel your feelings. But I've worked with people who accept, hey, that relationship is gone, she's moved on, he's moved on, they're married, they have kids. That's never gonna be an option again. I've accepted that that's over, and oh my god, I'm still here.